mm: improve page_lock_anon_vma() comment

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

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <[email protected]>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email protected]>
Cc: David Miller <[email protected]>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <[email protected]>
Cc: Russell King <[email protected]>
Cc: Paul Mundt <[email protected]>
Cc: Jeff Dike <[email protected]>
Cc: Richard Weinberger <[email protected]>
Cc: Tony Luck <[email protected]>
Cc: Nick Piggin <[email protected]>
Cc: Namhyung Kim <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

1 files changed, 16 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/mm/rmap.c b/mm/rmap.c
index c6044761617e..cc140811af56 100644
--- a/mm/rmap.c
+++ b/mm/rmap.c
@@ -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)
 {