Re: [PATCH v3] vfio/type1: Remove locked page accounting workqueue

[Peter Xu]

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 01:28:06PM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> If the mmap_sem is contented then the vfio type1 IOMMU backend will
> defer locked page accounting updates to a workqueue task.  This has a
> few problems and depending on which side the user tries to play, they
> might be over-penalized for unmaps that haven't yet been accounted or
> race the workqueue to enter more mappings than they're allowed.  The
> original intent of this workqueue mechanism seems to be focused on
> reducing latency through the ioctl, but we cannot do so at the cost
> of correctness.  Remove this workqueue mechanism and update the
> callers to allow for failure.  We can also now recheck the limit under
> write lock to make sure we don't exceed it.
> 
> vfio_pin_pages_remote() also now necessarily includes an unwind path
> which we can jump to directly if the consecutive page pinning finds
> that we're exceeding the user's memory limits.  This avoids the
> current lazy approach which does accounting and mapping up to the
> fault, only to return an error on the next iteration to unwind the
> entire vfio_dma.
> 
> Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Signed-off-by: Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@xxxxxxxxxx>

Reviewed-by: Peter Xu <peterx@xxxxxxxxxx>

-- 
Peter Xu