Re: [PATCH 21/23] x86, pcid, kaiser: allow flushing for future ASID switches
From: Dave Hansen
Date: Wed Nov 01 2017 - 16:59:22 EST
On 11/01/2017 01:31 PM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 7:17 AM, Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 11/01/2017 01:03 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>>> This ensures that any futuee context switches will do a full flush
>>>> of the TLB so they pick up the changes.
>>> I'm convuced. What was wrong with the old code? I guess I just don't
>>> see what the problem is that is solved by this patch.
>>
>> Instead of flushing *now* with INVPCID, this lets us flush *later* with
>> CR3. It just hijacks the code that you already have that flushes CR3
>> when loading a new ASID by making all ASIDs look new in the future.
>>
>> We have to load CR3 anyway, so we might as well just do this flush then.
>
> Would it make more sense to put it in flush_tlb_func_common() instead?
>
> Also, I don't understand what clear_non_loaded_ctxs() is trying to do.
> It looks like it's invalidating all the other logical address spaces.
> And I don't see why you want a all_other_ctxs_invalid variable. Isn't
> the goal to mark a single ASID as needing a *user* flush the next time
> we switch to user mode using that ASID? Your code seems like it's
> going to flush a lot of *kernel* PCIDs.
The point of the whole thing is to (relatively) efficiently flush
*kernel* TLB entries in *other* address spaces. I did it way down in
the TLB handling functions because not everybody goes through
flush_tlb_func_common() to flush kernel addresses.
I used the variable instead of just invalidating the contexts directly
because I hooked into the __flush_tlb_single() path and it's used in
loops like this:
for (addr = start; addr < end; addr++)
__flush_tlb_single()
I didn't want to add a loop that effectively does:
for (addr = start; addr < end; addr++)
__flush_tlb_single();
for (i = 0; i < TLB_NR_DYN_ASIDS; i++)
this_cpu_write(cpu_tlbstate.ctxs[i].ctx_id, 0);
Even with just 6 ASIDS it seemed a little silly. It would get _very_
silly if we ever decided to grow TLB_NR_DYN_ASIDS.