Re: [PATCH 2/4] thp: fix MADV_DONTNEED vs. numa balancing race

[Vlastimil Babka]

On 05/16/2017 10:29 PM, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 03:33:35PM +0200, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
>>
>> pmdp_invalidate() does:
>>
>>         pmd_t entry = *pmdp;
>>         set_pmd_at(vma->vm_mm, address, pmdp, pmd_mknotpresent(entry));
>>
>> so it's not atomic and if CPU sets dirty or accessed in the middle of
>> this, they will be lost?
> 
> I agree it looks like the dirty bit can be lost. Furthermore this also
> loses a MMU notifier invalidate that will lead to corruption at the
> secondary MMU level (which will keep using the old protection
> permission, potentially keeping writing to a wrprotected page).

Oh, I didn't paste the whole function, just the pmd manipulation.
There's also a third line:

flush_pmd_tlb_range(vma, address, address + HPAGE_PMD_SIZE);

so there's no missing invalidate, AFAICS? Sorry for the confusion.

>>
>> But I don't see how the other invalidate caller
>> __split_huge_pmd_locked() deals with this either. Andrea, any idea?
> 
> The original code I wrote did this in __split_huge_page_map to create
> the "entry" to establish in the pte pagetables:
> 
>     	       entry = mk_pte(page + i, vma->vm_page_prot);
> 	       entry = maybe_mkwrite(pte_mkdirty(entry),
> 	       	       		   vma);
> 
> For anonymous memory the dirty bit is only meaningful for swapping,
> and THP couldn't be swapped so setting it unconditional avoided any
> issue with the pmdp_invalidate; pmdp_establish.

Yeah, but now we are going to swap THP's, and we have shmem THP's...

> pmdp_invalidate is needed primarily to avoid aliasing of two different
> TLB translation pointing from the same virtual address to the the same
> physical address that triggered machine checks (while needing to keep
> the pmd huge at all times, back then it was also splitting huge,
> splitting is a software bit so userland could still access the data,
> splitting bit only blocked kernel code to manipulate on it similar to
> what migration entry does right now upstream, except those prevent
> userland to access the page during split which is less efficient than
> the splitting bit, but at least it's only used for the physical split,
> back then there was no difference between virtual and physical split
> and physical split is less frequent than the virtual one right now).

This took me a while to grasp, but I think I understand now :)

> It looks like this needs a pmdp_populate that atomically grabs the
> value of the pmd and returns it like pmdp_huge_get_and_clear_notify
> does

pmdp_huge_get_and_clear_notify() is now gone...

> and a _notify variant to use "freeze" is false (if freeze is true
> the MMU notifier invalidate must have happened when the pmd was set to
> a migration entry). If pmdp_populate_notify (freeze==true)
> /pmd_populate (freeze==false) would return the old pmd value
> atomically with xchg() (just instead of setting it to 0 we should set
> it to the mknotpresent one), then we can set the dirty bit on the ptes
> (__split_huge_pmd_locked) or in the pmd itself in the change_huge_pmd
> accordingly.

I think the confusion was partially caused by the comment at the
original caller of pmdp_invalidate():

we first mark the
* current pmd notpresent (atomically because here the pmd_trans_huge
* and pmd_trans_splitting must remain set at all times on the pmd
* until the split is complete for this pmd),

It says "atomically" but in fact that only means that the pmd_trans_huge
and pmd_trans_splitting flags are not temporarily cleared at any point
of time, right? It's not a true atomic swap.

> If the "dirty" flag information is obtained by the pmd read before
> calling pmdp_invalidate is not ok (losing _notify also not ok).

Right.

> Thanks!
> Andrea
> 
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