On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 7:18 PM Joel Fernandes (Google) joel@joelfernandes.org wrote:
This warning will only trigger when there is mutual alignment in the move operation. A solution, as suggested by Linus Torvalds [2], is to initiate the copy process at the PMD level whenever such alignment is present.
So this patch is actually simpler than I thought it would be.
But I'm a bit nervous about it. In particular, it ends doing
old_end = old_addr + len; ... expand old_addr/new_addr down to the pmd boundary .. return len + old_addr - old_end; /* how much done */
doesn't that return value end up being nonsensical now?
In particular, I think it can return a *negative* value, because of how old_addr was moved down, and the "now much done" might indeed be "negative" in the sense that it failed the move even "before" the original starting point.
And that negative value then ends up being a large positive one as an "unsigned long", of course.
So I get the feeling that it wants something like
if (old_addr + len < old_end) return 0;
there at the end.
But maybe there is something in there that guarantees that that case never happens. I didn't think too deeply about it, I just felt this looked odd.
Linus