Re: [tip:efi/core] x86/mm/pat: Use _PAGE_GLOBAL bit for EFI page table mappings

[Matt Fleming]

On Wed, 24 Feb, at 10:56:13AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 8:36 AM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>
> >> So the EFI runtime crap should not change once it is mapped. And those
> >> should be global. It is only natural.
> >
> > Why is it natural?
> >
> > Long-term, I'd rather see EFI runtime services use an actual mm_struct
> > and use_mm.
> 
> Definitely.
> 
> The EFI runtime page mapping may be unchanging, but that doesn't mean
> we should be mapping it all the time - the mapping may not change, but
> we will change away from it.
 
There is movement towards hanging the EFI memory map off of mm_struct
for x86. ARM and arm64 already do this and there were some patches
from Sylvain (Cc'd) to do this for the purposes of having a task
context that could be preempted while in the middle of an EFI runtime
call for some Intel platforms,

  https://lkml.kernel.org/r/1452702762-27216-4-git-send-email-sylvain.chouleur@xxxxxxxxx

Apart from the code simplification and not being required to open-code
the %cr3 diddling, are there other benefits of mm_struct and use_mm()
that make it appealing in the non-preemptible case?

Not that those aren't reasons enough.

> So marking those pages global is very wrong.

Ingo, Andy, how do you want to handle this patch? Maybe just drop it
from tip/efi/core while we prod around making all the EFI mappings
non-global? Nothing else depends on it, it can be dropped without any
harm.