On 9/9/20 5:29 AM, Gerald Schaefer wrote:

This only works well as long there are real pagetable pointers involved,
that can also be used for iteration. For gup_fast, or any other future
pagetable walkers using the READ_ONCE logic w/o lock, that is not true.
There are pointers involved to local pXd values on the stack, because of
the READ_ONCE logic, and our middle-level iteration will suddenly iterate
over such stack pointers instead of pagetable pointers.

By "There are pointers involved to local pXd values on the stack", did
you mean "locate" instead of "local"?  That sentence confused me.

Which code is it, exactly that allocates these troublesome on-stack pXd
values, btw?

This will be addressed by making the pXd_addr_end() dynamic, for which
we need to see the pXd value in order to determine its level / type.

Thanks for the explanation!