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[132/200] mm/page_alloc: add __free_pages() documentation

Message ID 20201215031109.HETudzx-2%akpm@linux-foundation.org (mailing list archive)
State New, archived
Headers show
Series [001/200] kthread: add kthread_work tracepoints | expand

Commit Message

Andrew Morton Dec. 15, 2020, 3:11 a.m. UTC
From: "Matthew Wilcox (Oracle)" <willy@infradead.org>
Subject: mm/page_alloc: add __free_pages() documentation

Provide some guidance towards when this might not be the right interface
to use.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20201027025523.3235-1-willy@infradead.org
Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: William Kucharski <william.kucharski@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
---

 mm/page_alloc.c |   20 ++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+)
diff mbox series

Patch

--- a/mm/page_alloc.c~mm-page_alloc-add-__free_pages-documentation
+++ a/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -5043,6 +5043,26 @@  static inline void free_the_page(struct
 		__free_pages_ok(page, order, FPI_NONE);
 }
 
+/**
+ * __free_pages - Free pages allocated with alloc_pages().
+ * @page: The page pointer returned from alloc_pages().
+ * @order: The order of the allocation.
+ *
+ * This function can free multi-page allocations that are not compound
+ * pages.  It does not check that the @order passed in matches that of
+ * the allocation, so it is easy to leak memory.  Freeing more memory
+ * than was allocated will probably emit a warning.
+ *
+ * If the last reference to this page is speculative, it will be released
+ * by put_page() which only frees the first page of a non-compound
+ * allocation.  To prevent the remaining pages from being leaked, we free
+ * the subsequent pages here.  If you want to use the page's reference
+ * count to decide when to free the allocation, you should allocate a
+ * compound page, and use put_page() instead of __free_pages().
+ *
+ * Context: May be called in interrupt context or while holding a normal
+ * spinlock, but not in NMI context or while holding a raw spinlock.
+ */
 void __free_pages(struct page *page, unsigned int order)
 {
 	if (put_page_testzero(page))