On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 07:40:25PM -0800, John Hubbard wrote:

For huge pages (and in fact, any compound page), the
GUP_PIN_COUNTING_BIAS scheme tends to overflow too easily, each tail
page increments the head page->_refcount by GUP_PIN_COUNTING_BIAS
(1024). That limits the number of huge pages that can be pinned.

This patch removes that limitation, by using an exact form of pin
counting for compound pages of order > 1. The "order > 1" is required
because this approach uses the 3rd struct page in the compound page, and
order 1 compound pages only have two pages, so that won't work there.

Could you update the comment for HPAGE_PMD_ORDER < 2 check in
hugepage_init() to reflect addtional user for the condition.

A new struct page field, hpage_pinned_refcount, has been added,
replacing a padding field in the union (so no new space is used).

This enhancement also has a useful side effect: huge pages and compound
pages (of order > 1) do not suffer from the "potential false positives"
problem that is discussed in the page_dma_pinned() comment block. That
is because these compound pages have extra space for tracking things, so
they get exact pin counts instead of overloading page->_refcount.

Documentation/core-api/pin_user_pages.rst is updated accordingly.

Suggested-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>

Acked-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <redacted>

-- 
 Kirill A. Shutemov