From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 16:59:06 -0700 From: Andrew Morton Subject: Re: [RFC] page fault retry with NOPAGE_RETRY Message-Id: <20060919165906.3d641236.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: <1158709835.6002.203.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <1158274508.14473.88.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20060915001151.75f9a71b.akpm@osdl.org> <45107ECE.5040603@google.com> <1158709835.6002.203.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Cc: Mike Waychison , linux-mm@kvack.org, Linux Kernel list , Linus Torvalds List-ID: On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 09:50:35 +1000 Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: > On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 16:35 -0700, Mike Waychison wrote: > > Patch attached. > > > > As Andrew points out, the logic is a bit hacky and using a flag in > > current->flags to determine whether we have done the retry or not already. > > > > I too think the right approach to being able to handle these kinds of > > retries in a more general fashion is to introduce a struct > > pagefault_args along the page faulting path. Within it, we could > > introduce a reason for the retry so the higher levels would be able to > > better understand what to do. > > .../... > > I need to re-read your mail and Andrew as at this point, I don't quite > see why we need that args and/or that current->flags bit instead of > always returning all the way to userland and let the faulting > instruction happen again (which means you don't block in the kernel, can > take signals etc... That would amount to a busy wait, waiting for the disk IO to complete. So we need to go to sleep somewhere (in D state, because we _are_ waiting for disk IO). Returning all the way to userspace and immediately retaking the fault is unneeded extra work. > thus do you actually need to prevent multiple > retries ?) I expect there are livelock scenarios. For example, process A could spin on posix_fadvise(some libc text page, POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED), perhaps causing other applications to get permanently stuck in the kernel. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org