Re: [PATCH v5 00/27] Memory Folios

[Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 02:14:00PM -0400, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> Anyway, we digressed quite far here. My argument was simply that it's
> conceivable we'll switch to a default allocation block and page size
> that is larger than the smallest paging size supported by the CPU and
> the kernel. (Various architectures might support multiple page sizes,
> but once you pick one, that's the smallest quantity the kernel pages.)

We've had several attempts in the past to make 'struct page' refer to
a different number of bytes than the-size-of-a-single-pte, and they've
all failed in one way or another.  I don't think changing PAGE_SIZE to
any other size is reasonable.

Maybe we have a larger allocation unit in the future, maybe we do
something else, but that should have its own name, not 'struct page'.
I think the shortest path to getting what you want is having a superpage
allocator that the current page allocator can allocate from.  When a
superpage is allocated from the superpage allocator, we allocate an
array of struct pages for it.

> I don't think folio as an abstraction is cooked enough to replace such
> a major part of the kernel with it. so I'm against merging it now.
> 
> I would really like to see a better definition of what it actually
> represents, instead of a fluid combination of implementation details
> and conveniences.

Here's the current kernel-doc for it:

/**
 * struct folio - Represents a contiguous set of bytes.
 * @flags: Identical to the page flags.
 * @lru: Least Recently Used list; tracks how recently this folio was used.
 * @mapping: The file this page belongs to, or refers to the anon_vma for
 *    anonymous pages.
 * @index: Offset within the file, in units of pages.  For anonymous pages,
 *    this is the index from the beginning of the mmap.
 * @private: Filesystem per-folio data (see attach_folio_private()).
 *    Used for swp_entry_t if FolioSwapCache().
 * @_mapcount: How many times this folio is mapped to userspace.  Use
 *    folio_mapcount() to access it.
 * @_refcount: Number of references to this folio.  Use folio_ref_count()
 *    to read it.
 * @memcg_data: Memory Control Group data.
 *
 * A folio is a physically, virtually and logically contiguous set
 * of bytes.  It is a power-of-two in size, and it is aligned to that
 * same power-of-two.  It is at least as large as %PAGE_SIZE.  If it is
 * in the page cache, it is at a file offset which is a multiple of that
 * power-of-two.
 */
struct folio {
        /* private: don't document the anon union */
        union {
                struct {
        /* public: */
                        unsigned long flags;
                        struct list_head lru;
                        struct address_space *mapping;
                        pgoff_t index;
                        unsigned long private;
                        atomic_t _mapcount;
                        atomic_t _refcount;
#ifdef CONFIG_MEMCG
                        unsigned long memcg_data;
#endif
        /* private: the union with struct page is transitional */
                };
                struct page page;
        };
};