Frustratingly, gfp_t is really divided into two classes of flags. One are
the context dependent ones (can we sleep? can we enter filesystem? block
subsystem? should we use some extra reserves, etc.). The other ones are
the type of memory required and depend on how the algorithm is implemented
rather than the point at which the memory is allocated (highmem? dma
memory? etc).
Some of the functions which allocate a page and add it to page cache take
a gfp_t, but sometimes those functions or their callers aren't really
doing the right thing: when allocating pagecache page, the memory type
should be mapping_gfp_mask(mapping). When allocating radix tree nodes,
the memory type should be kernel mapped (not highmem) memory. The gfp_t
argument should only really be needed for context dependent options.
This patch doesn't really solve that tangle in a nice way, but it does
attempt to fix a couple of bugs.
- find_or_create_page changes its radix-tree allocation to only include
the main context dependent flags in order so the pagecache page may be
allocated from arbitrary types of memory without affecting the
radix-tree. In practice, slab allocations don't come from highmem
anyway, and radix-tree only uses slab allocations. So there isn't a
practical change (unless some fs uses GFP_DMA for pages).
- grab_cache_page_nowait() is changed to allocate radix-tree nodes with
GFP_NOFS, because it is not supposed to reenter the filesystem. This
bug could cause lock recursion if a filesystem is not expecting the
function to reenter the fs (as-per documentation).
Filesystems should be careful about exactly what semantics they want and
what they get when fiddling with gfp_t masks to allocate pagecache. One
should be as liberal as possible with the type of memory that can be used,
and same for the the context specific flags.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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