Re: [PATCH 6/6] x86: Fix stray A/D bit setting into non-present PTEs

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 5:12 PM, Dave Hansen <dave@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> From: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> The Intel(R) Xeon Phi(TM) Processor x200 Family (codename: Knights
> Landing) has an erratum where a processor thread setting the Accessed
> or Dirty bits may not do so atomically against its checks for the
> Present bit.  This may cause a thread (which is about to page fault)
> to set A and/or D, even though the Present bit had already been
> atomically cleared.

So I don't think your approach is wrong, but I suspect this is
overkill, and what we should instead just do is to not use the A/D
bits at all in the swap representation.

The swap-entry representation was a bit tight on 32-bit page table
entries, but in 64-bit ones, I think we have tons of bits, don't we?
So we could decide just to not use those two bits on x86.

It's not like anybody will ever care about 32-bit page tables on
Knights Landing anyway.

So rather than add this kind of complexity and worry, how about just
simplifying the problem?

Or was there some discussion or implication I missed?

             Linus