The ultimate goal of the folios project is to turn struct page into:

struct page {
        unsigned long memdesc;
};

Bits 0-3 of memdesc are a type field that describes what the remaining bits are used for.

Misc memory

Type 0 is used for memory which needs no further data associated with it. Bits 4-10 are used as a subtype to determine what the memory is used for:

Bit 11 is set if the page may be mapped to userspace.

Bits 12-17 are used to store the order of the page. The high bits are used to store section/node/zone information, as is done today with the page flags.

XXX: How to indicate that a page was allocated from reserves like pfmemalloc today?

NOTE! There is no refcount for this kind of memory! Nor mapcount! get_page() / put_page() will throw an error for them. You can free the pages, and they will go straight back to the page allocator. If you need a refcount, allocate a folio instead. You can still map them to userspace, but they will be treated like a PFNMAP.

struct buddy

Type 1 is used for pages which are in the MatthewWilcox/BuddyAllocator. This is either one or two words of data which is used to manage the pages (see the link for more detail).

Memdesc pointers

All structs pointed to from a memdesc must be allocated from a slab which has its alignment set to 16 bytes (in order to allow the bottom 4 bits to be used for the type). That implies that they are a multiple of 16 bytes in size. The slab must also have the TYPESAFE_BY_RCU flag set as some page walkers will attempt to look up the memdesc from the page while holding only the RCU read lock.

struct folio

struct folio {
    unsigned long flags;
    struct list_head lru;
    struct address_space *mapping;
    pgoff_t index;
    void *private;
    atomic_t _refcount;
    atomic_t _mapcount;
    unsigned long pfn;
    unsigned long memcg_data;
};

This looks very similar to today. The only addition is the pfn, which we can use for getting the struct page if needed.

Other structs

TBD

Allocating memory

Device drivers that do not touch the contents of struct page can continue calling alloc_pages() as they do today. They will get back a struct page pointer which will have subtype "Unknown" but they won't care.

We'll add a new memdesc_alloc_pages() family which allocate the memory and set each page->memdesc to the passed-in memdesc. So each memdesc allocator will first use slab to allocate a memdesc, then allocate the pages that point to that memdesc.

alloc_pages_exact

We'll follow the same approach as today; allocate a buddy of sufficient size, but we'll expose a new primitive buddy_free_tail() which will release the tail pages back to the buddy allocator.

Slab memdesc

There's a minor recursion problem for the slab memdesc. This can be avoided by special-casing the struct slab allocation; any time we need to allocate a new slab for the slab memdesc cache, we _do not_ allocate a struct slab for it; we use the first object in the allocated memory for its own struct slab.

Freeing memory

Folios (file/anon/ksm) have a refcount. These should be freed with folio_put(). Other memdescs may not have a refcount (eg slab).

Misc allocations (type 0) are simply passed back to the page allocator which will turn them into Buddy pages.

Memory control group

Splitting folios

It is going to be stupidly expensive to split an order-9 allocation into 512 order-0 allocations. We'll have to allocate 512 folios. We may want to optimise split_page() to only allocate folios for pages we're not going to immediately free.

Mapping memory into userspace

File, anon memory and KSM memory is rmappable. The rmap does not apply to other kinds of memory (networking, device driver, vmalloc, etc). These kinds of memory should be added to VM_MIXEDMAP or VM_PFNMAP mappings only.

Things to remember

ext4 attaches a buffer_head to memory allocated from slab. virt_to_folio() should probably return NULL in this case?