From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail172.messagelabs.com (mail172.messagelabs.com [216.82.254.3]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A8A20620096 for ; Thu, 6 May 2010 10:17:52 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 6 May 2010 07:15:31 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm,migration: Prevent rmap_walk_[anon|ksm] seeing the wrong VMA information In-Reply-To: <20100506100208.GB20979@csn.ul.ie> Message-ID: References: <1273065281-13334-1-git-send-email-mel@csn.ul.ie> <1273065281-13334-2-git-send-email-mel@csn.ul.ie> <20100505145620.GP20979@csn.ul.ie> <20100505175311.GU20979@csn.ul.ie> <20100506002255.GY20979@csn.ul.ie> <20100506100208.GB20979@csn.ul.ie> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Mel Gorman Cc: Andrew Morton , Linux-MM , LKML , Minchan Kim , KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki , Christoph Lameter , Andrea Arcangeli , Rik van Riel List-ID: On Thu, 6 May 2010, Mel Gorman wrote: > > > > What makes this ok is the fact that it must be running under the RCU read > > lock, and anon_vma's thus cannot be released. > > This is very subtle in itself. RCU guarantees that the anon_vma exists > but does it guarantee that it's the same one we expect and that it > hasn't been freed and reused? Nothing. And we shouldn't care. If it's been freed and re-used, then all the anon_vma's (and vma's) associated with the original anon_vma (and page) have been free'd. And that, in turn, means that we don't really need to lock anything at all. The fact that we end up locking an anon_vma that _used_ to be the root anon_vma is immaterial - the lock won't _help_, but it shouldn't hurt either, since it's still a valid spinlock. Now, the above is only true as far as the anon_vma itself is concerned. It's entirely possible that any _other_ data structures would need to be double-checked after getting the lock. For example, is the _page_ still associated with that anon_vma? But that's an external issue as far as the anon_vma locking is concerned - presumably the 'rmap_walk()' caller will have made sure that the page itself is stable somehow. Linus -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org