Re: [PATCH 14/15] mm: fix TLB flush race between migration, andchange_protection_range

[Christoph Lameter]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2013, Mel Gorman wrote:

> I looked at what would be required to implement migration entry support for
> PMDs. It's major surgery because we do not have something like swap-like
> entries to use at that page table level. It looked like it would require
> inserting a fake entry (easiest would be to point to a global page) that
> all page table walkers would recognise, blocking on it and teaching every
> page table walker to get it right.

Well something needs to cause a fault and stop accesses to the page.

> One can't do something simple like clear the entry out because then the
> no page handlers for GUP or faults insert the zero page behind and it goes
> to hell and we can't hold the page table lock across the migration copy.

Right you need to have special migration entry there. Same as for regular
sized pages.


> The patch flushes the TLBs as it is and future accesses are help up in the
> NUMA hinting fault handler. It's functionally similar to having a migration
> entry albeit it is special cased to handle just automatic NUMA balancing

Hmmm... Hopefully that will work. I'd rather see a clean extension of what
we use for regular pages. If we add functionality to huge pages to operate
more like regular ones then this could be an issue.

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