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/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: William Kucharski <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Mike Rapoport <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 40baa2421136..a04dc456ed8d 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -5043,6 +5043,26 @@ static inline void free_the_page(struct page *page, unsigned int order)
 		__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))