Re: [PATCH 1/4] mm: Trial do_wp_page() simplification

[Ira Weiny]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 07:09:00PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 05:40:59PM -0400, Peter Xu wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 01:35:56PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > For that to happen, we'd need to have the vma flag so that we wouldn't
> > > have any worry about non-pinners, but as you suggested, I think even
> > > just a mm-wide counter - or flag - to deal with the fast-bup case is
> > > likely perfectly sufficient.
> > 
> > Would mm_struct.pinned_vm suffice?
> 
> I think that could be a good long term goal
> 
> IIRC last time we dug into the locked_vm vs pinned_vm mess it didn't
> get fixed. There is a mix of both kinds, as you saw, and some
> resistance I don't clearly remember to changing it.
> 
> My advice for this -rc fix is to go with a single bit in the mm_struct
> set on any call to pin_user_pages*
> 
> Then only users using pin_user_pages and forking are the only ones who
> would ever do extra COW on fork. I think that is OK for -rc, this
> workload should be rare due to the various historical issues. Anyhow,
> a slow down regression is better than a it is broken regression.
> 
> This can be improved into a counter later. Due to the pinned_vm
> accounting all call sites should have the mm_struct at unpin, but I
> have a feeling it will take a alot of driver patches to sort it all
> out.

Agreed.  The HFI1 driver for example increments/decrements pinned_vm on it's
own.  I've kind of always felt dirty for that...

I think long term it would be better to move this accounting to
pin_user_pages() but Jason is correct that I think that is going to be too
complex for an rc.

Could we move pinned_vm out of the drivers/rdma subsystem?

Ira

> 
> Jason
>