Re: Ack to merge through DRM? WAS Re: [PATCH v2 1/5] mm: Add write-protect and clean utilities for address space ranges

[Thomas HellstrÃm (VMware)]

On 9/27/19 12:20 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 1:55 PM Thomas HellstrÃm (VMware)
> <thomas_os@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Well, we're working on supporting huge puds and pmds in the graphics
> > VMAs, although in the write-notify cases we're looking at here, we would
> > probably want to split them down to PTE level.
> Well, that's what the existing walker code does if you don't have that
> "pud_entry()" callback.
>
> That said, I assume you would *not* want to do that if the huge
> pud/pmd is already clean and read-only, but just continue.
>
> So you may want to have a special pud_entry() that handles that case.
> Eventually. Maybe. Although honestly, if you're doing dirty tracking,
> I doubt it makes much sense to use largepages.

The approach we're looking at in this case is to keep huge entries 
write-protected and split them in the wp_huge_xxx() code's fallback path 
with the mmap_sem held. This means that there will actually be huge 
entries in the page-walking code soon, but as you say, only entries that 
we want to ignore and not split. So we'd also need a way to avoid the 
pagewalk splitting for the situation when someone faults a huge entry in 
just before the call to split_huge_xxx.

> > Looking at zap_pud_range() which when called from unmap_mapping_pages()
> > uses identical locking (no mmap_sem), it seems we should be able to get
> > away with i_mmap_lock(), making sure the whole page table doesn't
> > disappear under us. So it's not clear to me why the mmap_sem is strictly
> > needed here. Better to sort those restrictions out now rather than when
> > huge entries start appearing.
> zap_pud_range()actually does have that
>
>                 VM_BUG_ON_VMA(!rwsem_is_locked(&tlb->mm->mmap_sem), vma);
>
> exactly for the case where it might have to split the pud entry.

Yes. My take on this is that locking the PUD ptl can be done either with 
the mmap_sem or the i_mmap_lock if present and that we should update the 
asserts in xxx_trans_huge_lock to reflect that. But when actually 
splitting transhuge pages you don't want to race with khugepaged, so you 
need the mmap_sem. For the graphics VMAs (MIXEDMAP), khugepaged never 
touches them. Yet.

> It's why they've never gotten translated to use the generic walker code.

OK. Yes there are a number of various specialized pagewalks all over the 
mm code.

But another thing that worries me is that the page-table modifications 
that happen in the callback use functionality that is not guaranteed to 
be exported, and that mm people don't want them to be exported because 
you don't want the drivers to go hacking around in page tables, which 
means that the two callbacks used here would need to be a set of core 
helpers anyway.

So I figure what I would end up with would actually be an extern 
__walk_page_range anyway, and slightly modified asserts. Do you think 
that could be acceptible?

Thanks,

Thomas


>             Linus