Re: [PATCH v6 09/12] x86/mm: enable broadcast TLB invalidation for multi-threaded processes

[Rik van Riel]

On Wed, 2025-01-22 at 09:38 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> 
> Looking at this more... I'm left wondering, did 'we' look at any
> other
> architecture code at all? 
> 
> For example, look at arch/arm64/mm/context.c and see how their reset
> works. Notably, they are not at all limited to reclaiming free'd
> ASIDs,
> but will very aggressively take back all ASIDs except for the current
> running ones.
> 
I did look at the ARM64 code, and while their reset
is much nicer, it looks like that comes at a cost on
each process at context switch time.

In new_context(), there is a call to check_update_reserved_asid(),
which will iterate over all CPUs to check whether this
process's ASID is part of the reserved list that got
carried over during the rollover.

I don't know if that would scale well enough to work
on systems with thousands of CPUs.

> If we want to move towards relying on broadcast TBLI, we'll need to
> go in that direction.

For single threaded processes, which are still very
common, a local flush would likely be faster than
broadcast flushes, even if multiple broadcast flushes
can be pending simultaneously.

For very large systems with a large number of processes,
I agree we want to move in that direction, but we may
need to figure out whether or not everybody taking the 
cpu_asid_lock at rollover time, and then scanning all
other CPUs from check_update_reserved_asid(), with the
lock held, would scale to systems with thousands of CPUs.

Everybody taking the cpu_asid_lock would probably be
fine, if they didn't all have to scan over all the
CPUs.

If we can figure out a more scalable way to do the
new_context() stuff, this would definitely be the
way to go.

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