From:   Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@linaro.org>
To:     netdev@vger.kernel.org
Cc:     alexander.duyck@gmail.com,
        Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@linaro.org>,
        Jesper Dangaard Brouer <hawk@kernel.org>,
        "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>,
        Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>,
        Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>,
        Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: [PATCH] page_pool: add a comment explaining the fragment counter usage
Date:   Fri, 27 Jan 2023 12:16:27 +0200
Message-Id: <20230127101627.891614-1-ilias.apalodimas@linaro.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Precedence: bulk

When reading the page_pool code the first impression is that keeping
two separate counters, one being the page refcnt and the other being
fragment pp_frag_count, is counter-intuitive.

However without that fragment counter we don't know when to reliably
destroy or sync the outstanding DMA mappings.  So let's add a comment
explaining this part.

Signed-off-by: Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@linaro.org>
---
 include/net/page_pool.h | 8 ++++++++
 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+)

diff --git a/include/net/page_pool.h b/include/net/page_pool.h
index 813c93499f20..115dbce6d431 100644
--- a/include/net/page_pool.h
+++ b/include/net/page_pool.h
@@ -277,6 +277,14 @@ void page_pool_put_defragged_page(struct page_pool *pool, struct page *page,
 				  unsigned int dma_sync_size,
 				  bool allow_direct);
 
+/* pp_frag_count is our number of outstanding DMA maps.  We can't rely on the
+ * page refcnt for that as we don't know who might be holding page references
+ * and we can't reliably destroy or sync DMA mappings of the fragments.
+ *
+ * When pp_frag_count reaches 0 we can either recycle the page, if the page
+ * refcnt is 1, or return it back to the memory allocator and destroy any
+ * mappings we have.
+ */
 static inline void page_pool_fragment_page(struct page *page, long nr)
 {
 	atomic_long_set(&page->pp_frag_count, nr);
-- 
2.38.1