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mm: improve page_lock_anon_vma() comment
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A slightly more verbose comment to go along with the trickery in
page_lock_anon_vma().

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Cc: Jeff Dike <jdike@addtoit.com>
Cc: Richard Weinberger <richard@nod.at>
Cc: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
Cc: Namhyung Kim <namhyung@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Peter Zijlstra authored and Linus Torvalds committed May 25, 2011
1 parent 25aeeb0 commit 6111e4c
Showing 1 changed file with 16 additions and 2 deletions.
18 changes: 16 additions & 2 deletions mm/rmap.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -320,8 +320,22 @@ void __init anon_vma_init(void)
}

/*
* Getting a lock on a stable anon_vma from a page off the LRU is
* tricky: page_lock_anon_vma rely on RCU to guard against the races.
* Getting a lock on a stable anon_vma from a page off the LRU is tricky!
*
* Since there is no serialization what so ever against page_remove_rmap()
* the best this function can do is return a locked anon_vma that might
* have been relevant to this page.
*
* The page might have been remapped to a different anon_vma or the anon_vma
* returned may already be freed (and even reused).
*
* All users of this function must be very careful when walking the anon_vma
* chain and verify that the page in question is indeed mapped in it
* [ something equivalent to page_mapped_in_vma() ].
*
* Since anon_vma's slab is DESTROY_BY_RCU and we know from page_remove_rmap()
* that the anon_vma pointer from page->mapping is valid if there is a
* mapcount, we can dereference the anon_vma after observing those.
*/
struct anon_vma *page_lock_anon_vma(struct page *page)
{
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