Re: [PATCH v1 0/3] s390/uv: handle folios that cannot be split while dirty

From: David Hildenbrand
Date: Fri May 16 2025 - 14:57:07 EST


On 16.05.25 19:17, Claudio Imbrenda wrote:
On Fri, 16 May 2025 14:39:43 +0200
David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From patch #3:

"
Currently, starting a PV VM on an iomap-based filesystem with large
folio support, such as XFS, will not work. We'll be stuck in
unpack_one()->gmap_make_secure(), because we can't seem to make progress
splitting the large folio.

The problem is that we require a writable PTE but a writable PTE under such
filesystems will imply a dirty folio.

So whenever we have a writable PTE, we'll have a dirty folio, and dirty
iomap folios cannot currently get split, because
split_folio()->split_huge_page_to_list_to_order()->filemap_release_folio()
will fail in iomap_release_folio().

So we will not make any progress splitting such large folios.
"

Let's fix one related problem during unpack first, to then handle such
folios by triggering writeback before immediately trying to split them
again.

This makes it work on XFS with large folios again.

Long-term, we should cleanly supporting splitting such folios even
without writeback, but that's a bit harder to implement and not a quick
fix.

picked for 6.16, I think it will survive the CI without issues, since
I assume you tested this thoroughly

I did test what was known to be broken, but our QE did not run a bigger test on it. So giving it some soaking time + waiting for a bit for more review might be a good idea!

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb