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Date:   Thu, 11 Oct 2018 07:20:13 -0600
From:   Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ziepe.ca>
To:     Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>, john.hubbard@gmail.com,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>,
        Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-rdma <linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
        Jerome Glisse <jglisse@redhat.com>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
        Ralph Campbell <rcampbell@nvidia.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 2/3] mm: introduce put_user_page*(), placeholder
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Message-ID: <20181011132013.GA5968@ziepe.ca>
References: <20181008211623.30796-1-jhubbard@nvidia.com>
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 <5198a797-fa34-c859-ff9d-568834a85a83@nvidia.com>
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On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 10:49:29AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:

> > This is a real worry.  If someone uses a mistaken put_page() then how
> > will that bug manifest at runtime?  Under what set of circumstances
> > will the kernel trigger the bug?
> 
> At runtime such bug will manifest as a page that can never be evicted from
> memory. We could warn in put_page() if page reference count drops below
> bare minimum for given user pin count which would be able to catch some
> issues but it won't be 100% reliable. So at this point I'm more leaning
> towards making get_user_pages() return a different type than just
> struct page * to make it much harder for refcount to go wrong...

At least for the infiniband code being used as an example here we take
the struct page from get_user_pages, then stick it in a sgl, and at
put_page time we get the page back out of the sgl via sg_page()

So type safety will not help this case... I wonder how many other
users are similar? I think this is a pretty reasonable flow for DMA
with user pages.

Jason