Re: Should page->count ever be -1?

[Andrea Arcangeli]

On Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 03:07:03PM -0600, Timur Tabi wrote:
> I'm experiencing some kind of memory leaks playing with ioremap and iounmap,
> and I've narrowed down the problem to iounmap refusing to unmap the memory that
> I just mapped.  The line of code in question is
> 
> 	if (!PageReserved(page) && atomic_dec_and_test(&page->count)) {
> 
> from page_alloc.c (this is 2.2.18pre15).  It appears that page->count is
> already zero when this code is executed, and after it's executed, page->count
> becomes -1 (or more accurately, 0xFFFFFFFF).  Is this acceptable, or is it an
> error condition?

It's an error condition. Make sure you marked the page as reserved in the mmap
callback if it's not an mmio region outside RAM.

Andrea