[PATCH v7 12/14] x86/mm: Move flush_tlb_info back to the stack

From: Chuyi Zhou

Date: Tue Jun 09 2026 - 05:39:42 EST


flush_tlb_info benefits from cacheline alignment, but using
cacheline-aligned stack storage directly can grow stack usage too much on
configurations with large SMP_CACHE_BYTES values[1]. That problem caused
commit 515ab7c41306 ("x86/mm: Align TLB invalidation info") to be
reverted. Commit 3db6d5a5ecaf ("x86/mm/tlb: Remove 'struct flush_tlb_info'
from the stack") moved flush_tlb_info to per-CPU storage, which avoided the
stack growth problem while preserving cacheline alignment. That was a good
fit while the callers kept preemption disabled for the whole flush
operation.

However, a single per-CPU flush_tlb_info also requires all flush_tlb*
operations to keep preemption disabled while the object is in use, so
that it cannot be overwritten by another flush on the same CPU.
flush_tlb* may send IPIs to remote CPUs and synchronously wait for all
remote CPUs to complete their local TLB flushes. That wait can take tens
of milliseconds when interrupts are disabled on a remote CPU or when a
large number of remote CPUs are involved.

The following changes need to shorten the CPU-pinned/preemption-disabled
section around those remote TLB flush waits. Move flush_tlb_info back to
caller-private stack storage so the caller does not have to stay on the
same CPU until the remote flush completes.

The previous patch capped the type alignment at 64 bytes. This keeps the
alignment benefit for stack objects without reintroducing the old
large-cacheline stack usage problem.

To evaluate the performance impact of this patch, use the following
script to reproduce the microbenchmark mentioned in commit 3db6d5a5ecaf
("x86/mm/tlb: Remove 'struct flush_tlb_info' from the stack"). The test
environment is an Ice Lake system (Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8336C) with
128 CPUs and 2 NUMA nodes. During the test, the threads were bound to
specific CPUs, and both pti and mitigations were disabled:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <pthread.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#define NUM_OPS 1000000
#define NUM_THREADS 3
#define NUM_RUNS 5
#define PAGE_SIZE 4096

volatile int stop_threads = 0;

void *busy_wait_thread(void *arg) {
while (!stop_threads) {
__asm__ volatile ("nop");
}
return NULL;
}

long long get_usec() {
struct timeval tv;
gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
return tv.tv_sec * 1000000LL + tv.tv_usec;
}

int main() {
pthread_t threads[NUM_THREADS];
char *addr;
int i, r;
addr = mmap(NULL, PAGE_SIZE, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE
| MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0);

if (addr == MAP_FAILED) {
perror("mmap");
exit(1);
}

for (i = 0; i < NUM_THREADS; i++) {
if (pthread_create(&threads[i], NULL, busy_wait_thread, NULL))
exit(1);
}

printf("Running benchmark: %d runs, %d ops each, %d background\n"
"threads\n", NUM_RUNS, NUM_OPS, NUM_THREADS);

for (r = 0; r < NUM_RUNS; r++) {
long long start, end;
start = get_usec();
for (i = 0; i < NUM_OPS; i++) {
addr[0] = 1;
if (madvise(addr, PAGE_SIZE, MADV_DONTNEED)) {
perror("madvise");
exit(1);
}
}
end = get_usec();
double duration = (double)(end - start);
double avg_lat = duration / NUM_OPS;
printf("Run %d: Total time %.2f us, Avg latency %.4f us/op\n",
r + 1, duration, avg_lat);
}
stop_threads = 1;
for (i = 0; i < NUM_THREADS; i++)
pthread_join(threads[i], NULL);
munmap(addr, PAGE_SIZE);
return 0;
}

base on-stack-aligned on-stack-not-aligned
---- --------- -----------
avg (usec/op) 2.5278 2.5261 2.5508
stddev 0.0007 0.0027 0.0023

The benchmark results show that the average latency difference between
the baseline (base) and the properly aligned stack variable
(on-stack-aligned) is within the standard deviation (stddev). This
indicates that the variations are caused by testing noise, and reverting
to a stack variable with proper alignment causes no performance
regression compared to the per-CPU implementation. The unaligned version
(on-stack-not-aligned) shows a minor performance drop. This demonstrates
that we can shorten the CPU-pinned/preemption-disabled section without
sacrificing performance.

With caller-private storage there is no shared per-CPU object to protect,
so remove the DEBUG_VM reentrancy counter as well.

Link[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/all/tip-780e0106d468a2962b16b52fdf42898f2639e0a0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
Signed-off-by: Chuyi Zhou <zhouchuyi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Nadav Amit <nadav.amit@xxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Tested-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
arch/x86/mm/tlb.c | 71 ++++++++++-------------------------------------
1 file changed, 15 insertions(+), 56 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c b/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c
index c999d5cd3ea8..0c55ee84d50c 100644
--- a/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c
+++ b/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c
@@ -1373,12 +1373,6 @@ void flush_tlb_multi(const struct cpumask *cpumask,
*/
unsigned long tlb_single_page_flush_ceiling __read_mostly = 33;

-static DEFINE_PER_CPU_SHARED_ALIGNED(struct flush_tlb_info, flush_tlb_info);
-
-#ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_VM
-static DEFINE_PER_CPU(unsigned int, flush_tlb_info_idx);
-#endif
-
static void init_flush_tlb_info(struct flush_tlb_info *info,
struct mm_struct *mm,
unsigned long start, unsigned long end,
@@ -1404,50 +1398,20 @@ static void init_flush_tlb_info(struct flush_tlb_info *info,
info->trim_cpumask = 0;
}

-static struct flush_tlb_info *get_flush_tlb_info(struct mm_struct *mm,
- unsigned long start, unsigned long end,
- unsigned int stride_shift, bool freed_tables,
- u64 new_tlb_gen)
-{
- struct flush_tlb_info *info = this_cpu_ptr(&flush_tlb_info);
-
-#ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_VM
- /*
- * Ensure that the following code is non-reentrant and flush_tlb_info
- * is not overwritten. This means no TLB flushing is initiated by
- * interrupt handlers and machine-check exception handlers.
- */
- BUG_ON(this_cpu_inc_return(flush_tlb_info_idx) != 1);
-#endif
-
- init_flush_tlb_info(info, mm, start, end, stride_shift, freed_tables,
- new_tlb_gen);
-
- return info;
-}
-
-static void put_flush_tlb_info(void)
-{
-#ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_VM
- /* Complete reentrancy prevention checks */
- barrier();
- this_cpu_dec(flush_tlb_info_idx);
-#endif
-}
-
void flush_tlb_mm_range(struct mm_struct *mm, unsigned long start,
unsigned long end, unsigned int stride_shift,
bool freed_tables)
{
- struct flush_tlb_info *info;
+ struct flush_tlb_info _info;
+ struct flush_tlb_info *info = &_info;
int cpu = get_cpu();
u64 new_tlb_gen;

/* This is also a barrier that synchronizes with switch_mm(). */
new_tlb_gen = inc_mm_tlb_gen(mm);

- info = get_flush_tlb_info(mm, start, end, stride_shift, freed_tables,
- new_tlb_gen);
+ init_flush_tlb_info(&_info, mm, start, end, stride_shift, freed_tables,
+ new_tlb_gen);

/*
* flush_tlb_multi() is not optimized for the common case in which only
@@ -1467,7 +1431,6 @@ void flush_tlb_mm_range(struct mm_struct *mm, unsigned long start,
local_irq_enable();
}

- put_flush_tlb_info();
put_cpu();
mmu_notifier_arch_invalidate_secondary_tlbs(mm, start, end);
}
@@ -1537,19 +1500,16 @@ static void kernel_tlb_flush_range(struct flush_tlb_info *info)

void flush_tlb_kernel_range(unsigned long start, unsigned long end)
{
- struct flush_tlb_info *info;
+ struct flush_tlb_info info;

guard(preempt)();
+ init_flush_tlb_info(&info, NULL, start, end, PAGE_SHIFT, false,
+ TLB_GENERATION_INVALID);

- info = get_flush_tlb_info(NULL, start, end, PAGE_SHIFT, false,
- TLB_GENERATION_INVALID);
-
- if (info->end == TLB_FLUSH_ALL)
- kernel_tlb_flush_all(info);
+ if (info.end == TLB_FLUSH_ALL)
+ kernel_tlb_flush_all(&info);
else
- kernel_tlb_flush_range(info);
-
- put_flush_tlb_info();
+ kernel_tlb_flush_range(&info);
}

/*
@@ -1717,12 +1677,12 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL_FOR_KVM(__flush_tlb_all);

void arch_tlbbatch_flush(struct arch_tlbflush_unmap_batch *batch)
{
- struct flush_tlb_info *info;
+ struct flush_tlb_info info;

int cpu = get_cpu();

- info = get_flush_tlb_info(NULL, 0, TLB_FLUSH_ALL, 0, false,
- TLB_GENERATION_INVALID);
+ init_flush_tlb_info(&info, NULL, 0, TLB_FLUSH_ALL, 0, false,
+ TLB_GENERATION_INVALID);
/*
* flush_tlb_multi() is not optimized for the common case in which only
* a local TLB flush is needed. Optimize this use-case by calling
@@ -1732,17 +1692,16 @@ void arch_tlbbatch_flush(struct arch_tlbflush_unmap_batch *batch)
invlpgb_flush_all_nonglobals();
batch->unmapped_pages = false;
} else if (cpumask_any_but(&batch->cpumask, cpu) < nr_cpu_ids) {
- flush_tlb_multi(&batch->cpumask, info);
+ flush_tlb_multi(&batch->cpumask, &info);
} else if (cpumask_test_cpu(cpu, &batch->cpumask)) {
lockdep_assert_irqs_enabled();
local_irq_disable();
- flush_tlb_func(info);
+ flush_tlb_func(&info);
local_irq_enable();
}

cpumask_clear(&batch->cpumask);

- put_flush_tlb_info();
put_cpu();
}

--
2.20.1