We can disable a THP split or a hugepage collapse by disabling irq.
We do send IPI to all the cpus in the early part of split/collapse,
and disabling local irq ensure we don't make progress with
split/collapse. If the THP is getting split we return NULL from
find_linux_pte_or_hugepte(). For all the current callers it should be ok.
We need to be careful if we want to use returned pte_t pointer outside
the irq disabled region. W.r.t to THP split, the pfn remains the same,
but then a hugepage collapse will result in a pfn change. There are
few steps we can take to avoid a hugepage collapse.One way is to take page
reference inside the irq disable region. Other option is to take
mmap_sem so that a parallel collapse will not happen. We can also
disable collapse by taking pmd_lock. Another method used by kvm
subsystem is to check whether we had a mmu_notifer update in between
using mmu_notifier_retry().
Signed-off-by: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>