[PATCH v31 04/12] arm64: mm: allow for unmapping part of kernel mapping

On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 07:21:32PM +0900, AKASHI Takahiro wrote:

On Wed, Feb 01, 2017 at 04:03:54PM +0000, Mark Rutland wrote:

quoted

Hi,

On Wed, Feb 01, 2017 at 09:46:23PM +0900, AKASHI Takahiro wrote:

quoted

A new function, remove_pgd_mapping(), is added.
It allows us to unmap a specific portion of kernel mapping later as far as
the mapping is made using create_pgd_mapping() and unless we try to free
a sub-set of memory range within a section mapping.

I'm not keen on adding more page table modification code. It was painful
enough to ensure that those worked in all configurations.

Why can't we reuse create_pgd_mapping()? If we pass page_mappings_only,
and use an invalid prot (i.e. 0), what is the problem?

As I did in v30?
(though my implementation in v30 should be improved.)

Something like that. I wasn't entirely sure why we needed to change
those functions so much, so I'm clearly missing something there. I'll go
have another look.

quoted

I can see that we wouldn't free/reallocate the pud or pmd entries, but
the "wasted" memory should be small. If anything, I'd argue that it's
preferable to keep that around so that we don't have to allocate memory
when we need to map the crashkernel region.

Is there another problem I'm missing?

If we don't need to free unused page tables, that would make things
much simple. There are still some minor problems on the merge, but
we can sort it out.

I'm not sure I follow what you mean by 'on merge' here. Could you
elaborate?

Thanks,
Mark.