Re: [PATCH v2.1 04/26] mm: allow VM_FAULT_RETRY for multiple times

[Jerome Glisse]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 12:25:44PM +0800, Peter Xu wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 10:53:11AM -0500, Jerome Glisse wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 04:56:56PM +0800, Peter Xu wrote:
> > > The idea comes from a discussion between Linus and Andrea [1].

[...]

> > > diff --git a/arch/x86/mm/fault.c b/arch/x86/mm/fault.c
> > > index 248ff0a28ecd..d842c3e02a50 100644
> > > --- a/arch/x86/mm/fault.c
> > > +++ b/arch/x86/mm/fault.c
> > > @@ -1483,9 +1483,7 @@ void do_user_addr_fault(struct pt_regs *regs,
> > >  	if (unlikely(fault & VM_FAULT_RETRY)) {
> > >  		bool is_user = flags & FAULT_FLAG_USER;
> > >  
> > > -		/* Retry at most once */
> > >  		if (flags & FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY) {
> > > -			flags &= ~FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY;
> > >  			flags |= FAULT_FLAG_TRIED;
> > >  			if (is_user && signal_pending(tsk))
> > >  				return;
> > 
> > So here you have a change in behavior, it can retry indefinitly for as
> > long as they are no signal. Don't you want so test for FAULT_FLAG_TRIED ?
> 
> These first five patches do want to allow the page fault to retry as
> much as needed.  "indefinitely" seems to be a scary word, but IMHO
> this is fine for page faults since otherwise we'll simply crash the
> program or even crash the system depending on the fault context, so it
> seems to be nowhere worse.
> 
> For userspace programs, if anything really really go wrong (so far I
> still cannot think a valid scenario in a bug-free system, but just
> assuming...) and it loops indefinitely, IMHO it'll just hang the buggy
> process itself rather than coredump, and the admin can simply kill the
> process to retake the resources since we'll still detect signals.
> 
> Or did I misunderstood the question?

No i think you are right, it is fine to keep retrying while they are
no signal maybe just add a comment that says so in so many words :)
So people do not see that as a potential issue.

> > [...]
> > 
> > > diff --git a/include/linux/mm.h b/include/linux/mm.h
> > > index 80bb6408fe73..4e11c9639f1b 100644
> > > --- a/include/linux/mm.h
> > > +++ b/include/linux/mm.h
> > > @@ -341,11 +341,21 @@ extern pgprot_t protection_map[16];
> > >  #define FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY	0x04	/* Retry fault if blocking */
> > >  #define FAULT_FLAG_RETRY_NOWAIT	0x08	/* Don't drop mmap_sem and wait when retrying */
> > >  #define FAULT_FLAG_KILLABLE	0x10	/* The fault task is in SIGKILL killable region */
> > > -#define FAULT_FLAG_TRIED	0x20	/* Second try */
> > > +#define FAULT_FLAG_TRIED	0x20	/* We've tried once */
> > >  #define FAULT_FLAG_USER		0x40	/* The fault originated in userspace */
> > >  #define FAULT_FLAG_REMOTE	0x80	/* faulting for non current tsk/mm */
> > >  #define FAULT_FLAG_INSTRUCTION  0x100	/* The fault was during an instruction fetch */
> > >  
> > > +/*
> > > + * Returns true if the page fault allows retry and this is the first
> > > + * attempt of the fault handling; false otherwise.
> > > + */
> > 
> > You should add why it returns false if it is not the first try ie to
> > avoid starvation.
> 
> How about:
> 
>         Returns true if the page fault allows retry and this is the
>         first attempt of the fault handling; false otherwise.  This is
>         mostly used for places where we want to try to avoid taking
>         the mmap_sem for too long a time when waiting for another
>         condition to change, in which case we can try to be polite to
>         release the mmap_sem in the first round to avoid potential
>         starvation of other processes that would also want the
>         mmap_sem.
> 
> ?

Looks perfect to me.

Cheers,
Jérôme