Re: mm: mmu_gather: do not define delayed_rmap if not used

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 11:51 PM Alexander Gordeev
<agordeev@linux.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> In cases the delayed rmap removal is not used (which are
> currently UP and s390) skip delayed_rmap flag and make
> the related code paths no-op.

So I'm not convinced about this patch.

I particularly dislike adding even more #ifdef's around the data
structure - it already is pretty nasty, and it was hard to see where
things were initialized.

The only actual code impact of this is in tlb_next_batch(), which
tests for "do I have delayed rmaps pending, in which case I won't add
new batches". Everything else is already either optimized away, or
just "one bit declared in a structure that already has bitfields and
has room for several extra bits":

And that "I need to allocate new batches" case really doesn't matter
anyway - it's not even build at all on s390, and on UP where it's
there but technically pointless to have the test it really isn't
noticeable.

So the previous patch I was "this shouldn't actually _matter_, but it
does seem cleaner to do it this way".

But _this_ patch makes me go "it still doesn't matter, but now this
patch is actually adding extra infrastructure for the 'not-mattering'
case".

So I don't _hate_ this patch, but I think this actually makes the
current mess wrt our 'struct mmu_gather' worse rather than better.

That structure is already a pain, with horrendous initialization and
different bit-fields having different lifetimes. I'd rather have one
unconditional simple bitfield, than have another bitfield that has
conditional complications.

              Linus