Commit 67d58ac4 authored Jan 06, 2009 by Nick Piggin Committed by Linus Torvalds Jan 06, 2009

mm: pagecache gfp flags fix



Frustratingly, gfp_t is really divided into two classes of flags.  One are
the context dependent ones (can we sleep?  can we enter filesystem?  block
subsystem?  should we use some extra reserves, etc.).  The other ones are
the type of memory required and depend on how the algorithm is implemented
rather than the point at which the memory is allocated (highmem?  dma
memory?  etc).

Some of the functions which allocate a page and add it to page cache take
a gfp_t, but sometimes those functions or their callers aren't really
doing the right thing: when allocating pagecache page, the memory type
should be mapping_gfp_mask(mapping).  When allocating radix tree nodes,
the memory type should be kernel mapped (not highmem) memory.  The gfp_t
argument should only really be needed for context dependent options.

This patch doesn't really solve that tangle in a nice way, but it does
attempt to fix a couple of bugs.

- find_or_create_page changes its radix-tree allocation to only include
  the main context dependent flags in order so the pagecache page may be
  allocated from arbitrary types of memory without affecting the
  radix-tree.  In practice, slab allocations don't come from highmem
  anyway, and radix-tree only uses slab allocations.  So there isn't a
  practical change (unless some fs uses GFP_DMA for pages).

- grab_cache_page_nowait() is changed to allocate radix-tree nodes with
  GFP_NOFS, because it is not supposed to reenter the filesystem.  This
  bug could cause lock recursion if a filesystem is not expecting the
  function to reenter the fs (as-per documentation).

Filesystems should be careful about exactly what semantics they want and
what they get when fiddling with gfp_t masks to allocate pagecache.  One
should be as liberal as possible with the type of memory that can be used,
and same for the the context specific flags.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

parent 856bf4d7

mm/filemap.c

+9 −2

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -741,7 +741,14 @@ repeat:
		page = __page_cache_alloc(gfp_mask);
		if (!page)
		return NULL;
		err = add_to_page_cache_lru(page, mapping, index, gfp_mask);
		/*
		* We want a regular kernel memory (not highmem or DMA etc)
		* allocation for the radix tree nodes, but we need to honour
		* the context-specific requirements the caller has asked for.
		* GFP_RECLAIM_MASK collects those requirements.
		*/
		err = add_to_page_cache_lru(page, mapping, index,
		(gfp_mask & GFP_RECLAIM_MASK));
		if (unlikely(err)) {
		page_cache_release(page);
		page = NULL;
		@@ -950,7 +957,7 @@ grab_cache_page_nowait(struct address_space *mapping, pgoff_t index)
		return NULL;
		}
		page = __page_cache_alloc(mapping_gfp_mask(mapping) & ~__GFP_FS);
		if (page && add_to_page_cache_lru(page, mapping, index, GFP_KERNEL)) {
		if (page && add_to_page_cache_lru(page, mapping, index, GFP_NOFS)) {
		page_cache_release(page);
		page = NULL;
		}

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