Re: [RFC] mm: gup: add helper page_try_gup_pin(page)

[David Hildenbrand]

On 04.11.19 20:03, Jerome Glisse wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 04, 2019 at 06:20:50PM +0800, Hillf Danton wrote:
> > On Sun, 3 Nov 2019 22:09:03 -0800 John Hubbard wrote:
> > > On 11/3/19 8:34 PM, Hillf Danton wrote:
> > > ...
> > > > > Well, as long as we're counting bits, I've taken 21 bits (!) to track
> > > > > "gupers". :)  More accurately, I'm sharing 31 bits with get_page()...please
> > > >
> > > > Would you please specify the reasoning of tracking multiple gupers
> > > > for a dirty page? Do you mean that it is all fine for guper-A to add
> > > > changes to guper-B's data without warning and vice versa?
> > >
> > > It's generally OK to call get_user_pages() on a page more than once.
> >
> > Does this explain that it's generally OK to gup pin a page under
> > writeback and then start DMA to it behind the flusher's back without
> > warning?
>
> It can happens today, is it ok ... well no but we live in an imperfect
> world. GUP have been abuse by few device driver over the years and those
> never checked what it meant to use it so now we are left with existing
> device driver that we can not break that do wrong thing.
>
> I personaly think that we should use bounce page for writeback so that
> writeback can still happens if a page is GUPed. John's patchset is the
> first step to be able to identify GUPed page and maybe special case them.
>
> > > And even though we are seeing some work to reduce the number of places
> > > in the kernel that call get_user_pages(), there are still lots of call sites.
> > > That means lots of combinations and situations that could result in more
> > > than one gup call per page.
> > >
> > > Furthermore, there is no mechanism, convention, documentation, nor anything
> > > at all that attempts to enforce "for each page, get_user_pages() may only
> > > be called once."
> >
> > What sense is this making wrt the data corruption resulting specifically
> > from multiple gup references?
>
> Multiple GUP references do not imply corruption. Only one or more devices
> writing to the page while writeback is happening is a cause of corruption.
> Multiple device writting in the same page concurrently is like multiple
> CPU thread doing the same. Either the application/device drivers are doing
> this rightfully on purpose or the application has a bug. Either way it is
> not our problem (note here i am talking about userspace portion of the
> device driver).

If I'm not completely off, we can have multiple GUP references easily by 
using KVM+VFIO.

--

Thanks,

David / dhildenb