Re: [PATCH RFC] arm64: introduce mm_context_t flags

[Catalin Marinas]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2017 at 08:29:40PM +0300, Yury Norov wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 02, 2017 at 05:39:01PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 05:48:25PM +0300, Yury Norov wrote:
> > > In patch 06beb72fbe23e ("arm64: introduce mm context flag to keep 32 bit task
> > > information") you introduce the field flags but use it only for a single flag -
> > > TIF_32BIT. It looks hacky to me for three reasons:
> > >  - The flag is introduced for the case where it's impossible to get the thread
> > >    info structure for the thread associated with mm. So thread_info flags (TIF)
> > >    may also be unavailable at place. This is not the case for the only existing
> > >    user of if - uprobes, but in general this approach requires to include thread
> > >    headers in mm code, which may become unwanted dependency.
> > >  - New flag, if it uses TIF bits, for consistency should for example set/clear
> > >    TIF_32BIT_AARCH64 for ILP32 tasks. And to be completely consistent, with
> > >    current approach we'd mirror thread_info flags to mm_context flags. And keep
> > >    it syncronized.
> > >  - If we start using TIF flags here, we cannot easily add new mm_context
> > >    specific bits because they may mess with TIF ones.
> > > 
> > > I think that this is not what was intended when you added new field in
> > > mm_context_t.
> > 
> > TIF_32BIT was handy at the time but it indeed denotes AArch32 user
> > task. For ILP32 we wouldn't need to set this bit since the instruction
> > set is A64 and uprobe should support it (though not sure anyone tried).
> > I noticed in your patch introducing binfmt_ilp32.c that SET_PERSONALITY
> > actually sets this flag in the mm context.
> 
> Depending on what will be decided here, I'll change ilp32 patch
> accordingly.

Since this was meant to keep track of AArch32 tasks, the ILP32
personality macros need to clear it.

> > As with the TIF bits, the PERSONALITY macros become more complicated
> > with more bits to set/clear. Since we don't have any plans for other mm
> > context flags (independent of TIF), should we simply rename it to
> > thread_flags and just copy the thread_info flags:
> > 
> > 	current->mm->context.thread_flags = current_thread_info()->flags;
> 
> This will also work. But it may raise questions to one who reads the
> code.
> - if mm_context needs the threads flags, why you copy it? Why not to
>   move flags to the mm_context_t? It is always available for
>   thread_info users.
> - for multithreaded applications there might be different set of bits
>   in the flags field in different theads. So what exactly will be in
>   context.thread_flags is a matter of case, and you'd explain somehow
>   which bits are reliable, and which are not.

That's a valid argument.

> - It doesn't sound convincing to me that there are no other candidates
>   for mm_context.flags bits. 6 month ago we didn't need the flags at all.
>   ARM64 is under intensive development, and it's highly probable that
>   candidates may appear one day.

I'm fine with changing the macro to MMCF_AARCH32, however, could move
the flag setting out of the SET_PERSONALITY macros, just to keep these
macros strictly to the TIF flags? We can probably add it to
arch_setup_new_exec(), something like:

static inline void arch_setup_new_exec(void)
{
	current->mm->context.flags = 0;
	if (test_thread_flag(TIF_32BIT))
		current->mm->context.flags |= MMCF_AARCH32;
}
#define arch_setup_new_exec	arch_setup_new_exec

I would go for always initialising the flags to 0 rather than clearing
certain bits, just to make it clear that we don't inherit them.

-- 
Catalin