Re: [PATCH v3 03/34] s390: Use pt_frag_refcount for pagetables

Gerald Schaefer <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.ports.m68k,gmane.linux.kernel.mm,gmane.linux.kernel.cross-arch,gmane.linux.ports.arm.kernel,gmane.linux.ports.hexagon,gmane.linux.ports.mips,gmane.linux.ports.ppc64.devel,gmane.linux.ports.riscv,gmane.linux.ports.sh.devel,gmane.linux.ports.sparc,gmane.linux.uml.devel,gmane.comp.emulators.xen.devel,gmane.comp.emulators.kvm.devel
Message-ID <20230601151900.6f184e8c@thinkpad-T15>
 On Wed, 31 May 2023 14:30:01 -0700
"Vishal Moola (Oracle)" <[email protected]> wrote:

> s390 currently uses _refcount to identify fragmented page tables.
> The page table struct already has a member pt_frag_refcount used by
> powerpc, so have s390 use that instead of the _refcount field as well.
> This improves the safety for _refcount and the page table tracking.
> 
> This also allows us to simplify the tracking since we can once again use
> the lower byte of pt_frag_refcount instead of the upper byte of _refcount.

This would conflict with s390 impact of pte_free_defer() work from Hugh Dickins
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/

There he uses pt_frag_refcount, or rather pt_mm in the same union, to save
the mm_struct for deferred pte_free().

I still need to look closer into both of your patch series, but so far it
seems that you have no hard functional requirement to switch from _refcount
to pt_frag_refcount here, for s390.

If this is correct, and you do not e.g. need this to make some other use
of _refcount, I would suggest to drop this patch.
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