mempolicy: rework mempolicy Reference Counting [yet again]

After further discussion with Christoph Lameter, it has become clear that my
earlier attempts to clean up the mempolicy reference counting were a bit of
overkill in some areas, resulting in superflous ref/unref in what are usually
fast paths.  In other areas, further inspection reveals that I botched the
unref for interleave policies.

A separate patch, suitable for upstream/stable trees, fixes up the known
errors in the previous attempt to fix reference counting.

This patch reworks the memory policy referencing counting and, one hopes,
simplifies the code.  Maybe I'll get it right this time.

See the update to the numa_memory_policy.txt document for a discussion of
memory policy reference counting that motivates this patch.

Summary:

Lookup of mempolicy, based on (vma, address) need only add a reference for
shared policy, and we need only unref the policy when finished for shared
policies.  So, this patch backs out all of the unneeded extra reference
counting added by my previous attempt.  It then unrefs only shared policies
when we're finished with them, using the mpol_cond_put() [conditional put]
helper function introduced by this patch.

Note that shmem_swapin() calls read_swap_cache_async() with a dummy vma
containing just the policy.  read_swap_cache_async() can call alloc_page_vma()
multiple times, so we can't let alloc_page_vma() unref the shared policy in
this case.  To avoid this, we make a copy of any non-null shared policy and
remove the MPOL_F_SHARED flag from the copy.  This copy occurs before reading
a page [or multiple pages] from swap, so the overhead should not be an issue
here.

I introduced a new static inline function "mpol_cond_copy()" to copy the
shared policy to an on-stack policy and remove the flags that would require a
conditional free.  The current implementation of mpol_cond_copy() assumes that
the struct mempolicy contains no pointers to dynamically allocated structures
that must be duplicated or reference counted during copy.

Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 35 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mempolicy.h b/include/linux/mempolicy.h
index 017def8..172b9c6 100644
--- a/include/linux/mempolicy.h
+++ b/include/linux/mempolicy.h
@@ -112,6 +112,31 @@ static inline void mpol_put(struct mempolicy *pol)
 		__mpol_put(pol);
 }
 
+/*
+ * Does mempolicy pol need explicit unref after use?
+ * Currently only needed for shared policies.
+ */
+static inline int mpol_needs_cond_ref(struct mempolicy *pol)
+{
+	return (pol && (pol->flags & MPOL_F_SHARED));
+}
+
+static inline void mpol_cond_put(struct mempolicy *pol)
+{
+	if (mpol_needs_cond_ref(pol))
+		__mpol_put(pol);
+}
+
+extern struct mempolicy *__mpol_cond_copy(struct mempolicy *tompol,
+					  struct mempolicy *frompol);
+static inline struct mempolicy *mpol_cond_copy(struct mempolicy *tompol,
+						struct mempolicy *frompol)
+{
+	if (!frompol)
+		return frompol;
+	return __mpol_cond_copy(tompol, frompol);
+}
+
 extern struct mempolicy *__mpol_dup(struct mempolicy *pol);
 static inline struct mempolicy *mpol_dup(struct mempolicy *pol)
 {
@@ -201,6 +226,16 @@ static inline void mpol_put(struct mempolicy *p)
 {
 }
 
+static inline void mpol_cond_put(struct mempolicy *pol)
+{
+}
+
+static inline struct mempolicy *mpol_cond_copy(struct mempolicy *to,
+						struct mempolicy *from)
+{
+	return from;
+}
+
 static inline void mpol_get(struct mempolicy *pol)
 {
 }