mm/hugetlb: document the reserve map/region tracking routines

While working on hugetlbfs fallocate support, I noticed the following race
in the existing code.  It is unlikely that this race is hit very often in
the current code.  However, if more functionality to add and remove pages
to hugetlbfs mappings (such as fallocate) is added the likelihood of
hitting this race will increase.

alloc_huge_page and hugetlb_reserve_pages use information from the reserve
map to determine if there are enough available huge pages to complete the
operation, as well as adjust global reserve and subpool usage counts.  The
order of operations is as follows:

- call region_chg() to determine the expected change based on reserve map
- determine if enough resources are available for this operation
- adjust global counts based on the expected change
- call region_add() to update the reserve map

The issue is that reserve map could change between the call to region_chg
and region_add.  In this case, the counters which were adjusted based on
the output of region_chg will not be correct.

In order to hit this race today, there must be an existing shared hugetlb
mmap created with the MAP_NORESERVE flag.  A page fault to allocate a huge
page via this mapping must occur at the same another task is mapping the
same region without the MAP_NORESERVE flag.

The patch set does not prevent the race from happening.  Rather, it adds
simple functionality to detect when the race has occurred.  If a race is
detected, then the incorrect counts are adjusted.

Review comments pointed out the need for documentation of the existing
region/reserve map routines.  This patch set also adds documentation in
this area.

This patch (of 3):

This is a documentation only patch and does not modify any code.
Descriptions of the routines used for reserve map/region tracking are
added.

Signed-off-by: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@oracle.com>
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>
Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions