Re: [PATCH 0/3] mm: treewide: make get_free_pages() and return void *

[Jiri Slaby <jirislaby@kernel.org>]

On 19. 10. 25, 2:30, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2025 at 12:29:59PM +0300, Mike Rapoport wrote:
>> Vast majority of allocations that use get_free_pages() and its derivatives
>> cast the returned unsigned long to a pointer and then cast it back to
>> unsigned long when freeing the memory.
>>
>> These castings are useless and only obfuscate the code.
>>
>> Make get_free_pages() and friends return 'void *' and free_pages() accept
>> 'void *' as its address parameter.
> 
> No.  Linus has rejected this change before.  I can't find it now, it was
> a long time ago.  Most of them shouldn't be using get_free_pages() at
> all, they should be using kmalloc().

I'd be interested in the refusal thread (what was the rejection exactly 
about). In a need of whole pages, why would I want to alloc more for 
metadata (using k*alloc)? Or what am I missing?

thanks,
-- 
js
suse labs