Re: [Linaro-mm-sig] [PATCH 04/18] dma-fence: prime lockdep annotations

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 03:48:49PM -0400, Felix Kuehling wrote:
> Am 2020-06-19 um 2:18 p.m. schrieb Jason Gunthorpe:
> > On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 02:09:35PM -0400, Jerome Glisse wrote:
> >> On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 02:23:08PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> >>> On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 06:19:41PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> The madness is only that device B's mmu notifier might need to wait
> >>>> for fence_B so that the dma operation finishes. Which in turn has to
> >>>> wait for device A to finish first.
> >>> So, it sound, fundamentally you've got this graph of operations across
> >>> an unknown set of drivers and the kernel cannot insert itself in
> >>> dma_fence hand offs to re-validate any of the buffers involved?
> >>> Buffers which by definition cannot be touched by the hardware yet.
> >>>
> >>> That really is a pretty horrible place to end up..
> >>>
> >>> Pinning really is right answer for this kind of work flow. I think
> >>> converting pinning to notifers should not be done unless notifier
> >>> invalidation is relatively bounded. 
> >>>
> >>> I know people like notifiers because they give a bit nicer performance
> >>> in some happy cases, but this cripples all the bad cases..
> >>>
> >>> If pinning doesn't work for some reason maybe we should address that?
> >> Note that the dma fence is only true for user ptr buffer which predate
> >> any HMM work and thus were using mmu notifier already. You need the
> >> mmu notifier there because of fork and other corner cases.
> > I wonder if we should try to fix the fork case more directly - RDMA
> > has this same problem and added MADV_DONTFORK a long time ago as a
> > hacky way to deal with it.
> >
> > Some crazy page pin that resolved COW in a way that always kept the
> > physical memory with the mm that initiated the pin?
> >
> > (isn't this broken for O_DIRECT as well anyhow?)
> >
> > How does mmu_notifiers help the fork case anyhow? Block fork from
> > progressing?
> 
> How much the mmu_notifier blocks fork progress depends, on quickly we
> can preempt GPU jobs accessing affected memory. If we don't have
> fine-grained preemption capability (graphics), the best we can do is
> wait for the GPU jobs to complete. We can also delay submission of new
> GPU jobs to the same memory until the MMU notifier is done. Future jobs
> would use the new page addresses.
> 
> With fine-grained preemption (ROCm compute), we can preempt GPU work on
> the affected adders space to minimize the delay seen by fork.
> 
> With recoverable device page faults, we can invalidate GPU page table
> entries, so device access to the affected pages stops immediately.
> 
> In all cases, the end result is, that the device page table gets updated
> with the address of the copied pages before the GPU accesses the COW
> memory again.Without the MMU notifier, we'd end up with the GPU
> corrupting memory of the other process.

The model here in fork has been wrong for a long time, and I do wonder
how O_DIRECT manages to not be broken too.. I guess the time windows
there are too small to get unlucky.

If you have a write pin on a page then it should not be COW'd into the
fork'd process but copied with the originating page remaining with the
original mm. 

I wonder if there is some easy way to achive that - if that is the
main reason to use notifiers then it would be a better solution.

Jason