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Date:   Fri, 8 May 2020 20:17:26 -0700
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
To:     Ralph Campbell <rcampbell@nvidia.com>
Cc:     nouveau@lists.freedesktop.org, linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kselftest@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Jerome Glisse <jglisse@redhat.com>,
        John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>,
        Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@mellanox.com>,
        Ben Skeggs <bskeggs@redhat.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Shuah Khan <shuah@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] nouveau/hmm: add support for mapping large pages
Message-ID: <20200509031726.GT16070@bombadil.infradead.org>
References: <20200508192009.15302-1-rcampbell@nvidia.com>
 <20200508195910.GR16070@bombadil.infradead.org>
 <72422dca-e025-002a-4748-addfb392ffc4@nvidia.com>
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On Fri, May 08, 2020 at 01:17:55PM -0700, Ralph Campbell wrote:
> On 5/8/20 12:59 PM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Fri, May 08, 2020 at 12:20:03PM -0700, Ralph Campbell wrote:
> > > hmm_range_fault() returns an array of page frame numbers and flags for
> > > how the pages are mapped in the requested process' page tables. The PFN
> > > can be used to get the struct page with hmm_pfn_to_page() and the page size
> > > order can be determined with compound_order(page) but if the page is larger
> > > than order 0 (PAGE_SIZE), there is no indication that the page is mapped
> > > using a larger page size. To be fully general, hmm_range_fault() would need
> > > to return the mapping size to handle cases like a 1GB compound page being
> > > mapped with 2MB PMD entries. However, the most common case is the mapping
> > > size the same as the underlying compound page size.
> > > This series adds a new output flag to indicate this so that callers know it
> > > is safe to use a large device page table mapping if one is available.
> > > Nouveau and the HMM tests are updated to use the new flag.
> > 
> > This explanation doesn't make any sense.  It doesn't matter how somebody
> > else has it mapped; if it's a PMD-sized page, you can map it with a
> > 2MB mapping.
> 
> Sure, the I/O will work OK, but is it safe?
> Copy on write isn't an issue? splitting a PMD in one process due to
> mprotect of a shared page will cause other process' page tables to be split
> the same way?

Are you saying that if you call this function on an address range of a
process which has done COW of a single page in the middle of a THP,
you want to return with this flag clear, but if the THP is still intact,
you want to set this flag?

> Recall that these are system memory pages that could be THPs, shmem, hugetlbfs,
> mmap shared file pages, etc.