Re: Question about x86/mm/gup.c's use of disabled interrupts
From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Wed Mar 18 2009 - 18:14:25 EST
Avi Kivity wrote:
Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
Disabling the interrupt will prevent the tlb flush IPI from coming
in and flushing this cpu's tlb, but I don't see how it will prevent
some other cpu from actually updating the pte in the pagetable,
which is what we're concerned about here.
The thread that cleared the pte holds the pte lock and is now
waiting for the IPI. The thread that wants to update the pte will
wait for the pte lock, thus also waits on the IPI and gup_fast()'s
local_irq_enable(). I think.
But hasn't it already done the pte update at that point?
(I think this conversation really is moot because the kernel never
does P->P pte updates any more; its always P->N->P.)
I thought you were concerned about cpu 0 doing a gup_fast(), cpu 1
doing P->N, and cpu 2 doing N->P. In this case cpu 2 is waiting on
the pte lock.
The issue is that if cpu 0 is doing a gup_fast() and other cpus are
doing P->P updates, then gup_fast() can potentially get a mix of old and
new pte values - where P->P is any aggregate set of unsynchronized P->N
and N->P operations on any number of other cpus. Ah, but if every P->N
is followed by a tlb flush, then disabling interrupts will hold off any
following N->P, allowing gup_fast to get a consistent pte snapshot.
Hm, awkward if flush_tlb_others doesn't IPI...
Won't stop munmap().
And I guess it does the tlb flush before freeing the pages, so disabling
the interrupt helps here too.
Simplest fix is to make gup_get_pte() a pvop, but that does seem like
putting a red flag in front of an inner-loop hotspot, or something...
The per-cpu tlb-flush exclusion flag might really be the way to go.
J
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