Re: [RFC PATCH v2 0/7] synchronously scan and reclaim empty user PTE pages

[Qi Zheng]

Hi all,

On 2024/8/5 20:55, Qi Zheng wrote:

[...]

> 2. When we use mmu_gather to batch flush tlb and free PTE pages, the TLB is not
>     flushed before pmd lock is unlocked. This may result in the following two
>     situations:
>
>     1) Userland can trigger page fault and fill a huge page, which will cause
>        the existence of small size TLB and huge TLB for the same address.
>
>     2) Userland can also trigger page fault and fill a PTE page, which will
>        cause the existence of two small size TLBs, but the PTE page they map
>        are different.
>
>     For case 1), according to Intel's TLB Application note (317080), some CPUs of
>     x86 do not allow it:
>
>     ```
>     If software modifies the paging structures so that the page size used for a
>     4-KByte range of linear addresses changes, the TLBs may subsequently contain
>     both ordinary and large-page translations for the address range.12 A reference
>     to a linear address in the address range may use either translation. Which of
>     the two translations is used may vary from one execution to another and the
>     choice may be implementation-specific.
>
>     Software wishing to prevent this uncertainty should not write to a paging-
>     structure entry in a way that would change, for any linear address, both the
>     page size and either the page frame or attributes. It can instead use the
>     following algorithm: first mark the relevant paging-structure entry (e.g.,
>     PDE) not present; then invalidate any translations for the affected linear
>     addresses (see Section 5.2); and then modify the relevant paging-structure
>     entry to mark it present and establish translation(s) for the new page size.
>     ```
>
>     We can also learn more information from the comments above pmdp_invalidate()
>     in __split_huge_pmd_locked().
>
>     For case 2), we can see from the comments above ptep_clear_flush() in
>     wp_page_copy() that this situation is also not allowed. Even without
>     this patch series, madvise(MADV_DONTNEED) can also cause this situation:
>
>             CPU 0                         CPU 1
>
>     madvise (MADV_DONTNEED)
>     -->  clear pte entry
>          pte_unmap_unlock
>                                        touch and tlb miss
> 				      --> set pte entry
>          mmu_gather flush tlb
>
>     But strangely, I didn't see any relevant fix code, maybe I missed something,
>     or is this guaranteed by userland?

I'm still quite confused about this, is there anyone who is familiar
with this part?

Thanks,
Qi

>     Anyway, this series defines the following two functions to be implemented by
>     the architecture. If the architecture does not allow the above two situations,
>     then define these two functions to flush the tlb before set_pmd_at().
>
>     - arch_flush_tlb_before_set_huge_page
>     - arch_flush_tlb_before_set_pte_page

[...]

>