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Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 3/9] mm: pagewalk: Don't split transhuge pmds when a
 pmd_entry is present
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Thomas Hellstrom <thellstrom@vmware.com>
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        Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>,
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        Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com>,
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From:   =?UTF-8?Q?Thomas_Hellstr=c3=b6m_=28VMware=29?= 
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Date:   Wed, 9 Oct 2019 22:06:32 +0200
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On 10/9/19 9:20 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> No. Your logic is garbage. The above code is completely broken.
>
> YOU CAN NOT AVOID TRHE SPLIT AND THEN GO ON AT THE PTE LEVEL.
>
> Don't you get it? There *is* no PTE level if you didn't split.

Hmm, This paragraph makes me think we have very different perceptions about what I'm trying to achieve.

I wanted the pte level to *only* get called for *pre-existing* pte entries.
Surely those must be able to exist even if we don't split occasional huge pmds in the pagewalk code?

>
> So what you should do is to just always return 0 in your pmd_entry().
> Boom, done. The only reason for the pmd_entry existing at all is to
> get the warning. Then, if you don't want to split it, you make that
> warning just return an error (or a positive value) instead and say
> "ok, that was bad, we don't handle it at all".
>
> And in some _future_ life, if anybody wants to actually say "yeah,
> let's not split it", make it have some "yeah I handled it" case.

Well yes, this is exactly what I want. Because any huge pmd we encounter 
should be read-only.

/Thomas