Re: [PATCH v5 3/3] mm/khugepaged: maintain page cache uptodate flag

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 06:03:37AM +0000, Song Liu wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Mar 23, 2023, at 8:30 PM, Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > 
> > The Uptodate flag check needs to be done by the caller; the
> > find_get_page() family return !uptodate pages.
> > 
> > But find_get_page() does not advertise itself as NMI-safe.  And I
> > think it's wrong to try to make it NMI-safe.  Most of the kernel is
> > not NMI-safe.  I think it's incumbent on the BPF people to get the
> > information they need ahead of taking the NMI.  NMI handlers are not
> > supposed to be doing a huge amount of work!  I don't really understand
> > why it needs to do work in NMI context; surely it can note the location of
> > the fault and queue work to be done later (eg on irq-enable, task-switch
> > or return-to-user)
> 
> The use case here is a profiler (similar to perf-record). Parsing the 
> build id in side the NMI makes the profiler a lot simpler. Otherwise, 
> we will need some post processing for each sample. 

Simpler for you, maybe.  But this is an NMI!  It's not supposed to
be doing printf-formatting or whatever, much less poking around
in the file cache.  Like perf, it should record a sample and then
convert that later.  Maybe it can defer to a tasklet, but i think
scheduling work is a better option.

> OTOH, it is totally fine if build_id_parse() fails some time, say < 5%. 
> The profiler output is still useful in such cases. 
> 
> I guess the next step is to replace find_get_page() with a NMI-safe
> version?

No, absolutely not.  Stop doing so much work in an NMI.