Re: [PATCH 1/3] Fix COW D-cache aliasing on fork

From: Ralf Baechle
Date: Fri Oct 20 2006 - 17:49:43 EST


On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 01:10:59PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Ok, this sounds sane.
>
> What should we do about this? How does this patch look to people?
>
> (Totally untested, and I'm not sure we should even do that whole
> "oldmm->mm_users" test, but I'm throwing it out here for discussion, in
> case it matters for performance. The second D$ flush should obviously be
> unnecessary for the common unthreaded case, which is why none of this has
> mattered historically, I think).
>
> Comments? We need ARM, MIPS, sparc and S390 at the very least to sign off
> on this, and somebody to write a nice explanation for the changelog (and
> preferably do this through -mm too).

As a minimal solution your patch would work for MIPS but performance would be
suboptimal.

With my D-cache alias series applied the flush_cache_mm() in dup_mmap()
becomes entirely redundant. When I delete the call (not part of my patchset)
it means 12% faster fork. But I'm not proposing this for 2.6.19.

Note this does not make the flush_cache_mm() on process termination
redundant ...

Ralf
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/