On Mon, Jul 31, 2023 at 11:23:59AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> So GUP-fast can only look at the page table data, and as such *has* to
> fail if the page table is inaccessible.
>
> But GUP in general? Why would it want to honor numa faulting?
> Particularly by default, and _particularly_ for things like
> FOLL_REMOTE.
True.
>
> In fact, I feel like this is what the real rule should be: we simply
> define that get_user_pages_fast() is about looking up the page in the
> page tables.
>
> So if you want something that acts like a page table lookup, you use
> that "fast" thing. It's literally how it is designed. The whole - and
> pretty much only - point of it is that it can be used with no locking
> at all, because it basically acts like the hardware lookup does.
Unfortunately I think at least kvm (besides the rest..) relies not only on
numa balancing but also fast-gup.. :-( Please refer to hva_to_pfn() where
it even supports fast-gup-only HVA translation when atomic==true set.
Thanks,
--
Peter Xu