On 5/19/26 09:27, Juhyung Park wrote:
> Hi Dave,
> 
> On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 1:02 AM Dave Hansen <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> On 5/19/26 08:10, Juhyung Park wrote:
>>>  #endif
>>>       } else {
>>> -             pagetable_free(page_ptdesc(page));
>>> +             /*
>>> +              * Use __free_pages() to honor @order: vmemmap PMD leaves
>>> +              * freed here are not compound pages, so pagetable_free()
>>> +              * would lose leak 511 of 512 pages per 2 MB chunk.
>>> +              */
>>> +             __free_pages(page, order);
>>>       }
>>>  }
>>
>> I find myself really wondering how much of this came from a human and
>> how much from the LLM. Could you share that with us?
> 
> Not my first kernel contribution, just so you know. (first in mm tho)
> 
> I asked Claude to write both the commit body and comment and it was
> too verbose. I manually trimmed it down.
> Sorry if it still sounds too LLM-ish.

Yeah, it still sounded really LLM-ish to me. Still rather chatty.

> This was tested on a VM with virtualized CXL device and toggling it
> back and forth was visibly causing leaks. kmemleak was unable to catch
> this (rightfully so), so I skeptically asked Claude to see if it can
> figure it out while pwd was the kernel source the VM was running.
> "Access the VM at "ssh -p2223 [email protected]". There's a memory
> leak whenever CXL memory switches modes via: daxctl reconfigure-device
> --mode=system-ram dax0.0 --force, daxctl reconfigure-device
> --mode=devdax dax0.0 --force. Figure out why. If you need to reboot
> the VM, do not do it yourself and ask me."
> 
> It did in 6 minutes and it basically told me to revert bf9e4e30f353. I
> was very skeptical and reviewed manually (with my short knowledge of
> mm) why this would be a correct fix.

Neato.

>> We're trying to get _away_ from using the 'struct page' APIs on page
>> tables. This goes backwards. Worst case, do:
>>
>>         /* vmemmap PMD leaves are not compound pages */
>>         for (i = 0; i < 1<<order; i++)
>>                 pagetable_free(page_ptdesc(&page[i]));
>>
>> Right?
> 
> Shouldn't I worry about the loop overhead? With order == 9, that's 512
> iterations. That's compounded to O(N) when the entire memory size is
> in consideration.

Is it optimal? No.

Will anybody ever notice? Also no.

Will anybody ever care? No sir.

Can you measure the difference? I'd wager a beer: No again.

Even if someone manages to notice, then you have a clear path to fix it
*right*: fix the ptdesc data structure to represent high-order allocations.

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