mm: improve documentation of page_order

Developers occasionally try and optimise PFN scanners by using
page_order but miss that in general it requires zone->lock.  This has
happened twice for compaction.c and rejected both times.  This patch
clarifies the documentation of page_order and adds a note to
compaction.c why page_order is not used.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweaks]
[lauraa@codeaurora.org: Corrected a page_zone(page)->lock reference]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Laura Abbott <lauraa@codeaurora.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This commit is contained in:
Mel Gorman 2014-01-23 15:53:38 -08:00 committed by Linus Torvalds
parent 0eef615665
commit 6c14466cc0
2 changed files with 9 additions and 4 deletions

View File

@ -523,7 +523,10 @@ isolate_migratepages_range(struct zone *zone, struct compact_control *cc,
if (!isolation_suitable(cc, page)) if (!isolation_suitable(cc, page))
goto next_pageblock; goto next_pageblock;
/* Skip if free */ /*
* Skip if free. page_order cannot be used without zone->lock
* as nothing prevents parallel allocations or buddy merging.
*/
if (PageBuddy(page)) if (PageBuddy(page))
continue; continue;

View File

@ -143,9 +143,11 @@ isolate_migratepages_range(struct zone *zone, struct compact_control *cc,
#endif #endif
/* /*
* function for dealing with page's order in buddy system. * This function returns the order of a free page in the buddy system. In
* zone->lock is already acquired when we use these. * general, page_zone(page)->lock must be held by the caller to prevent the
* So, we don't need atomic page->flags operations here. * page from being allocated in parallel and returning garbage as the order.
* If a caller does not hold page_zone(page)->lock, it must guarantee that the
* page cannot be allocated or merged in parallel.
*/ */
static inline unsigned long page_order(struct page *page) static inline unsigned long page_order(struct page *page)
{ {