Re: [RFC PATCH 00/14] Prevent cross-cache attacks in the SLUB allocator

[Vlastimil Babka]

On 9/18/23 14:08, Matteo Rizzo wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Sept 2023 at 18:30, Lameter, Christopher
>> Problems:
>>
>> - Overhead due to more TLB lookups
>>
>> - Larger amounts of TLBs are used for the OS. Currently we are trying to
>> use the maximum mappable TLBs to reduce their numbers. This presumably
>> means using 4K TLBs for all slab access.
> 
> Yes, we are using 4K pages for the slab mappings which is going to increase
> TLB pressure. I also tried writing a version of the patch that uses 2M
> pages which had slightly better performance, but that had its own problems.
> For example most slabs are much smaller than 2M, so we would need to create
> and map multiple slabs at once and we wouldn't be able to release the
> physical memory until all slabs in the 2M page are unused which increases
> fragmentation.
 At last LSF/MM [1] we basically discarded direct map fragmentation
avoidance as solving something that turns out to be insignificant, with the
exception of kernel code. As kernel code is unlikely to be allocated from
kmem caches due to W^X, we can hopefully assume it's also insignificant for
the virtual slab area.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/931406/