>_mapcount). While debugging this s/_count/_mapcount/ change I also noticed get_page is called by direct-io.c on pages returned by get_user_pages. That wasn't entirely safe because the two atomic_inc in get_page weren't atomic. As opposed to other get_user_page users like secondary-MMU page fault to establish the shadow pagetables would never call any superflous get_page after get_user_page returns. It's safer to make get_page universally safe for tail pages and to use get_page_foll() within follow_page (inside get_user_pages()). get_page_foll() is safe to do the refcounting for tail pages without taking any locks because it is run within PT lock protected critical sections (PT lock for pte and page_table_lock for pmd_trans_huge). The standard get_page() as invoked by direct-io instead will now take the compound_lock but still only for tail pages. The direct-io paths are usually I/O bound and the compound_lock is per THP so very finegrined, so there's no risk of scalability issues with it. A simple direct-io benchmarks with all lockdep prove locking and spinlock debugging infrastructure enabled shows identical performance and no overhead. So it's worth it. Ideally direct-io should stop calling get_page() on pages returned by get_user_pages(). The spinlock in get_page() is already optimized away for no-THP builds but doing get_page() on tail pages returned by GUP is generally a rare operation and usually only run in I/O paths. This new refcounting on page_tail->_mapcount in addition to avoiding new RCU critical sections will also allow the working set estimation code to work without any further complexity associated to the tail page refcounting with THP. Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli Reported-by: Michel Lespinasse Reviewed-by: Michel Lespinasse Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Hugh Dickins Cc: Johannes Weiner Cc: Rik van Riel Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Cc: David Gibson Cc: Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds ,e+2æ