From: Andy Lutomirski Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/6] shm: add sealing API Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 18:27:56 -0700 Message-ID: <5347451C.4060106@amacapital.net> References: <53470E26.2030306@cybernetics.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: David Herrmann , Tony Battersby Cc: linux-fsdevel , linux-mm , linux-kernel , "dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org" List-Id: dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org On 04/10/2014 05:22 PM, David Herrmann wrote: > Hi > > On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 11:33 PM, Tony Battersby wrote: >> For O_DIRECT the kernel pins the submitted pages in memory for DMA by >> incrementing the page reference counts when the I/O is submitted, >> allowing the pages to be modified by DMA even if they are no longer >> mapped in the address space of the process. This is different from a >> regular read(), which uses the CPU to copy the data and will fail if the >> pages are not mapped. > > Can you please provide an example code-path? For instance, > file_read_actor() does not pin any pages but only keeps the user-space > address and resolves it once it has data to write. This may be an issue for anything in the kernel that calls get_user_pages and holds onto the result at any time that mmap_sem isn't held. I don't know exactly what does that, but RDMA comes to mind. So does (ugh!) vmsplice, although I suspect that vmsplice doesn't write. --Andy -- 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