Re: [PATCH 09/12] KVM: MMU: introduce pte-list lockless walker

[Xiao Guangrong]

On 08/29/2013 07:33 PM, Xiao Guangrong wrote:
> On 08/29/2013 05:31 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 02:50:51PM +0800, Xiao Guangrong wrote:
>>> After more thinking, I still think rcu_assign_pointer() is unneeded when a entry
>>> is removed. The remove-API does not care the order between unlink the entry and
>>> the changes to its fields. It is the caller's responsibility:
>>> - in the case of rcuhlist, the caller uses call_rcu()/synchronize_rcu(), etc to
>>>   enforce all lookups exit and the later change on that entry is invisible to the
>>>   lookups.
>>>
>>> - In the case of rculist_nulls, it seems refcounter is used to guarantee the order
>>>   (see the example from Documentation/RCU/rculist_nulls.txt).
>>>
>>> - In our case, we allow the lookup to see the deleted desc even if it is in slab cache
>>>   or its is initialized or it is re-added.
>>>
>> BTW is it a good idea? We can access deleted desc while it is allocated
>> and initialized to zero by kmem_cache_zalloc(), are we sure we cannot
>> see partially initialized desc->sptes[] entry? On related note what about
>> 32 bit systems, they do not have atomic access to desc->sptes[].

Ah... wait. desc is a array of pointers:

struct pte_list_desc {
	u64 *sptes[PTE_LIST_EXT];
	struct pte_list_desc *more;
};

assigning a pointer is aways aotomic, but we should carefully initialize it
as you said. I will introduce a constructor for desc slab cache which initialize
the struct like this:

for (i = 0; i < PTE_LIST_EXT; i++)
	desc->sptes[i] = NULL;

It is okay.

> 
> Good eyes. This is a bug here.
> 
> It seems we do not have a good to fix this. How disable this optimization on
> 32 bit host, small changes:
> 
>  static inline void kvm_mmu_rcu_free_page_begin(struct kvm *kvm)
>  {
> +#ifdef CONFIG_X86_64
>         rcu_read_lock();
> 
>         kvm->arch.rcu_free_shadow_page = true;
>         /* Set the indicator before access shadow page. */
>         smp_mb();
> +#else
> +       spin_lock(kvm->mmu_lock);
> +#endif
>  }
> 
>  static inline void kvm_mmu_rcu_free_page_end(struct kvm *kvm)
>  {
> +#ifdef CONFIG_X86_64
>         /* Make sure that access shadow page has finished. */
>         smp_mb();
>         kvm->arch.rcu_free_shadow_page = false;
> 
>         rcu_read_unlock();
> +#else
> +       spin_unlock(kvm->mmu_lock);
> +#endif
>  }
> 
> 

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