On Fri, 11 Nov 2022 16:40:51 +0800 Zhongkun He [off-list ref] wrote:

Page allocation usage of task or vma policy occurs in the fault
path where we hold the mmap_lock for read. because replacing the
task or vma policy requires that the mmap_lock be held for write,
the policy can't be freed out from under us while we're using
it for page allocation. But there are some corner cases(e.g.
alloc_pages()) which not acquire any lock for read during the
page allocation. For this reason, task_work is used in
mpol_put_async() to free mempolicy in  pidfd_set_mempolicy().
Thuse, it avoids into race conditions.

This sounds a bit suspicious.  Please share much more detail about
these races.  If we proced with this design then mpol_put_async()
shouild have comments which fully describe the need for the async free.

How do we *know* that these races are fully prevented with this
approach?  How do we know that mpol_put_async() won't free the data
until the race window has fully passed?

Also, in some situations mpol_put_async() will free the data
synchronously anyway, so aren't these races still present?


Secondly, why was the `flags' argument added?  We might use it one day?
For what purpose?  I mean, every syscall could have a does-nothing
`flags' arg, but we don't do that.  What's the plan here?