On 8 Jun 2026, at 17:04, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 08, 2026 at 04:40:15PM -0400, Zi Yan wrote:
>> On 8 Jun 2026, at 16:33, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Jun 08, 2026 at 04:21:08PM -0400, Zi Yan wrote:
>>>> On 8 Jun 2026, at 15:59, Gregory Price wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, Jun 08, 2026 at 02:04:28PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>>>>>> On Mon, Jun 08, 2026 at 12:06:35PM +0100, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
>>>>>>> But instead of overloading user_addr to indicate all kinds of things,
>>>>>>> instead
>>>>>>> make life easier by actually breaking things out.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Like:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> enum alloc_context_type {
>>>>>>> KERNEL_ALLOCATION,
>>>>>>> USER_MAPPED_ALLOCATION,
>>>>>>> USER_UNMAPPED_ALLOCATION, // Maybe? Do we ever?
>>>>>>> /* Perhaps some other states we want to encode? */
>>>>>>> };
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> struct alloc_context {
>>>>>>> ...
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> enum alloc_context_type type;
>>>>>>> unsigned long user_addr; // Only set if type == USER_ALLOCATION
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> // Maybe something suggesting context or whether we init before
>>>>>>> in some
>>>>>>> // cases?
>>>>>>> };
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Ugh, please, no. As I suggested last time I commented on this
>>>>>> trainwreck of a series, lift the zeroing functionality from
>>>>>> alloc_frozen_pages() into its callers.
>>>>>
>>>>> This sort of just implies writing the "alloc_frozen_zeroed_pages()"
>>>>> wrapper that does the zeroing at the end before return, and then killing
>>>>> the post hook nonsense associated with it in the first place.
>>>>
>>>> This means it is going to be a multi-step optimization. This is probably
>>>> step 1.
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> None of this resolves the user address annoyance which is needed on some
>>>>> archs for cache flushing. Whether anyone agrees that the page allocator
>>>>> should be responsible for this particular operation - open debate.
>>>>
>>>> This is probably step 2. But does the virtio use case apply to these
>>>> archs? Does the performance matter for them? If not, maybe this part can
>>>> be left as a TODO.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Best Regards,
>>>> Yan, Zi
>>>
>>> I doubt it. But I don't get what's proposed, the code that we
>>> have to modify is arch independent?
>>
>> Change user_alloc_needs_zeroing() to only check address aliasing even
>> if that can cause double zeroing for virtio.
>>
>> Best Regards,
>> Yan, Zi
>
> Ah. I started with exactly that in v1/v2. It's a simple approach.
>
> But mm maintainers said no, user_alloc_needs_zeroing is a hack and
> I must not add to it.
Got it. It sounds that you now get conflicting ideas. Maybe you should
start a [DISCUSSION] thread that presents the high level idea of what
you want to achieve and all the ideas you got from the reviews, so that
people in this thread can have the big picture and come up a consensus
before you send another version.
Thank you for patiently replying my comments, since those points
apparently have been discussed in prior submissions.
Best Regards,
Yan, Zi
