[RFC 0/3] iommu/intel: Free empty page tables on unmaps

From: Pasha Tatashin
Date: Wed Dec 20 2023 - 22:19:28 EST


This series frees empty page tables on unmaps. It intends to be a
low overhead feature.

The read-writer lock is used to synchronize page table, but most of
time the lock is held is reader. It is held as a writer for short
period of time when unmapping a page that is bigger than the current
iova request. For all other cases this lock is read-only.

page->refcount is used in order to track number of entries at each page
table.

Microbenchmark data using iova_stress[1]:

Base:
yqbtg12:/home# ./iova_stress -s 16
dma_size: 4K iova space: 16T iommu: ~ 32783M time: 22.297s

/iova_stress -s 16
dma_size: 4K iova space: 16T iommu: ~ 0M time: 23.388s

The test maps/unmaps 4K pages and cycles through the IOVA space.
Base uses 32G of memory, and test completes in 22.3S.
Fix uses 0G of memory, and test completes in 23.4s.

I believe the proposed fix is a good compromize in terms of complexity/
scalability. A more scalable solution would be to spread read/writer
lock per-page table, and user page->private field to store the lock
itself.

However, since iommu already has some protection: i.e. no-one touches
the iova space of the request map/unmap we can avoid the extra complexity
and rely on a single per page table RW lock, and be in a reader mode
most of the time.

[1] https://github.com/soleen/iova_stress

Pasha Tatashin (3):
iommu/intel: Use page->refcount to count number of entries in IOMMU
iommu/intel: synchronize page table map and unmap operations
iommu/intel: free empty page tables on unmaps

drivers/iommu/intel/iommu.c | 153 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------
drivers/iommu/intel/iommu.h | 44 +++++++++--
2 files changed, 158 insertions(+), 39 deletions(-)

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