mm: speculative page references

If we can be sure that elevating the page_count on a pagecache page will
pin it, we can speculatively run this operation, and subsequently check to
see if we hit the right page rather than relying on holding a lock or
otherwise pinning a reference to the page.

This can be done if get_page/put_page behaves consistently throughout the
whole tree (ie.  if we "get" the page after it has been used for something
else, we must be able to free it with a put_page).

Actually, there is a period where the count behaves differently: when the
page is free or if it is a constituent page of a compound page.  We need
an atomic_inc_not_zero operation to ensure we don't try to grab the page
in either case.

This patch introduces the core locking protocol to the pagecache (ie.
adds page_cache_get_speculative, and tweaks some update-side code to make
it work).

Thanks to Hugh for pointing out an improvement to the algorithm setting
page_count to zero when we have control of all references, in order to
hold off speculative getters.

[kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com: fix migration_entry_wait()]
[hugh@veritas.com: fix add_to_page_cache]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: repair a comment]
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@us.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Acked-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/net/cassini.c b/drivers/net/cassini.c
index 83768df2780..f1936d51b45 100644
--- a/drivers/net/cassini.c
+++ b/drivers/net/cassini.c
@@ -576,6 +576,18 @@ static void cas_spare_recover(struct cas *cp, const gfp_t flags)
 	list_for_each_safe(elem, tmp, &list) {
 		cas_page_t *page = list_entry(elem, cas_page_t, list);
 
+		/*
+		 * With the lockless pagecache, cassini buffering scheme gets
+		 * slightly less accurate: we might find that a page has an
+		 * elevated reference count here, due to a speculative ref,
+		 * and skip it as in-use. Ideally we would be able to reclaim
+		 * it. However this would be such a rare case, it doesn't
+		 * matter too much as we should pick it up the next time round.
+		 *
+		 * Importantly, if we find that the page has a refcount of 1
+		 * here (our refcount), then we know it is definitely not inuse
+		 * so we can reuse it.
+		 */
 		if (page_count(page->buffer) > 1)
 			continue;