Re: [PATCH v2 3/7] mm/hugetlb: Rename avoid_reserve to cow_from_owner

[Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>]

Hi, Oscar,

On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 11:15:09AM +0100, Oscar Salvador wrote:
> Now, let me see if I get this straight:
> 
> 1) parent maps a hugetlb page, but not yet fault in.
> 2) forks, child faults-in the page

Agreed until here.

> 3) child doesn't have any reservation, when 'cow_from_owner' set to true
>    we check whether we have a spare hugetlb page to satisfy that

When the child fault in, it should trigger the hugetlb CoW fault, in which
case it should set 'cow_from_owner' to false (rather than true) always,
because it's not a CoW from owner (the child is not an owner).  See the
check in the fault path:

	if (is_vma_resv_set(vma, HPAGE_RESV_OWNER) &&
			old_folio != pagecache_folio)
		cow_from_owner = true;

Here I would expect when the child faults, the 1st OWNER check failed.

> 4) parent faults in the page
> 5) we do not have spare hugetlb pages, so we 'steal' it from the child
>    with unmap_ref_private.

Agreed on 4/5.

At last step 5, above check will become true, hence this is the place where
the allocation will have cow_from_owner set to true.

If we see the difference at step 3/5, that's also exactly why I renamed the
variable for the whole stack: it represents this special condition from the
top layer (fault) until the allocation layer, saying explicitly when it
should be set true (only "cow", from the "owner" not child), rather than a
very blurred idea of someone trying to avoid_reserve for whatever reason.
The hope is it made that niche path very clear in the allocation path, and
it discourage any other user using this flag which can be abuse (and cause
the allocation path harder to follow in general).

Thanks,

-- 
Peter Xu