How do we get to memdescs in a series of bisectable, small and reviewable steps?

From here (May 2024), finish converting all filesystems to folios. This is very parallel. Once that has finished, rename ->mapping to ->__folio_mapping and ->index to ->__folio_index

In parallel with this, pull struct page apart as has already been done for ptdesc, slab and zpdesc. The largest remaining piece is the netpool bump allocator.

Once all this has landed, we can start dynamically allocating the various memdescs and point to them from every page's compound_head (instead of just the tail page).

Then we can shrink struct page to 32 bytes,

struct folio {
    unsigned long flags;
    struct list_head lru;
    struct address_space *mapping;
    pgoff_t index;
    void *private;
    unsigned int _refcount;
    unsigned int _mapcount;
    unsigned int pincount;
    unsigned long pfn;
    struct mem_cgroup *memcg;
};

struct page {
    unsigned long flags;
    union {
        struct list_head buddy_list;
        struct list_head pcp_list;
        struct {
            unsigned long memdesc;
            int _refcount; // 0 for folios
        };
    };
    union {
        unsigned long private;
        struct {
            int _mapcount; // only used for folios?
        };
    };
};

In this 2025 world, we copy page->flags from the first page to the folio, but leave it intact to keep code calling page_zone() working the way it does today.

For a folio, the usage is:

flags (mostly read-only; PageAnonExclusive, PageHwPoison, maybe a couple of others) memdesc (points to the folio) mapcount (per-page mapcount)

Notes:

• What to do about PageTail()? Mark the page as a tail somehow?

• Still a few dozen users of page->lru to remove.

• Some filesystems still working with pages.
• movableops users need to use memdesc
• can only support 12 memdescs as list_head.next is only 4-byte aligned (so we can use 1-3,5-7,9-11,13-15 but not 0,4,8,12)

The next step is to shrink struct page to 16 bytes,

struct page {
    union {
        struct list_head buddy_list;
        struct {
            unsigned long memdesc;
            unsigned long private;
        };
    };
};

This will involve changes to page_zone(), page_to_nid() and so on.

After this, we can start working on removing accesses to page->private from device drivers. When that is finished, we can explore the various options presented in MatthewWilcox/BuddyAllocator