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Date:   Tue, 15 May 2018 11:10:36 +0200
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
To:     Pavel Tatashin <pasha.tatashin@oracle.com>
Cc:     Steven Sistare <steven.sistare@oracle.com>,
        Daniel Jordan <daniel.m.jordan@oracle.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, tglx@linutronix.de,
        Linux Memory Management List <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        mgorman@techsingularity.net, mingo@kernel.org,
        peterz@infradead.org, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>,
        Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>,
        Dennis Zhou <dennisszhou@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] mm: allow deferred page init for vmemmap only
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On Fri 11-05-18 10:17:55, Pavel Tatashin wrote:
> > Thanks that helped me to see the problem. On the other hand isn't this a
> > bit of an overkill? AFAICS this affects only NEED_PER_CPU_KM which is !SMP
> > and DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT makes only very limited sense on UP,
> > right?
> 
> > Or do we have more such places?
> 
> I do not know other places, but my worry is that trap_init() is arch
> specific and we cannot guarantee that arches won't do virt to phys in
> trap_init() in other places. Therefore, I think a proper fix is simply
> allow DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT when it is safe to do virt to phys without
> accessing struct pages, which is with SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP.

You are now disabling a potentially useful feature to SPARSEMEM users
without having any evidence that they do suffer from the issue which is
kinda sad. Especially when the only known offender is a UP pcp allocator
implementation.

I will not insist of course but it seems like your fix doesn't really
prevent virt_to_page or other direct page access either.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs