On Wed, 2011-09-21 at 15:17 +0200, Michal Nazarewicz wrote:
This 'struct page *'++ stuff is OK, but only for small, aligned areas. For at least some of the sparsemem modes (non-VMEMMAP), you could walk off of the end of the section_mem_map[] when you cross a MAX_ORDER boundary. I'd feel a little bit more comfortable if pfn_to_page() was being done each time, or only occasionally when you cross a section boundary.
I'm fine with that. I've used pointer arithmetic for performance reasons but if that may potentially lead to bugs then obviously pfn_to_page() should be used
pfn_to_page() on x86 these days is usually:
#define __pfn_to_page(pfn) (vmemmap + (pfn))
Even for the non-vmemmap sparsemem it stays pretty quick because the section array is in cache as you run through the loop.
There are ways to _minimize_ the number of pfn_to_page() calls by checking when you cross a section boundary, or even at a MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES boundary. But, I don't think it's worth the trouble.
-- Dave