[ofa-general] Re: [patch 1/9] EMM Notifier: The notifier calls

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@qumranet.com>]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 10:59:50AM -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> Did I see #v10? Could you start a new subject when you post please? Do 
> not respond to some old message otherwise the threading will be wrong.

I wasn't clear enough, #v10 was in the works... I was thinking about
the last two issues before posting it.

> How exactly does the GRU corrupt memory?

Jack added synchronize_rcu, I assume for a reason.

>  
> >    Another less obviously safe approach is to allow the register
> >    method to succeed only when mm_users=1 and the task is single
> >    threaded. This way if all the places where the mmu notifers aren't
> >    invoked on the mm not by the current task, are only doing
> >    invalidates after/before zapping ptes, if the istantiation of new
> >    ptes is single threaded too, we shouldn't worry if we miss an
> >    invalidate for a pte that is zero and doesn't point to any physical
> >    page. In the places where current->mm != mm I'm using
> >    invalidate_page 99% of the time, and that only follows the
> >    ptep_clear_flush. The problem are the range_begin that will happen
> >    before zapping the pte in places where current->mm !=
> >    mm. Unfortunately in my incremental patch where I move all
> >    invalidate_page outside of the PT lock to prepare for allowing
> >    sleeping inside the mmu notifiers, I used range_begin/end in places
> >    like try_to_unmap_cluster where current->mm != mm. In general
> >    this solution looks more fragile than the seqlock.
> 
> Hmmm... Okay that is one solution that would just require a BUG_ON in the 
> registration methods.

Perhaps you didn't notice that this solution can't work if you call
range_begin/end not in the "current" context and try_to_unmap_cluster
does exactly that for both my patchset and yours. Missing an _end is
ok, missing a _begin is never ok.

> Well doesnt the requirement of just one execution thread also deal with 
> that issue?

Yes, except again it can't work for try_to_unmap_cluster.

This solution is only applicable to #v10 if I fix try_to_unmap_cluster
to only call invalidate_page (relaying on the fact the VM holds a pin
and a lock on any page that is being mmu-notifier-invalidated).

You can't use the single threaded approach to solve either 1 or 2,
because your _begin call is called anywhere and that's where you call
the secondary-tlb flush and it's fatal to miss it.

invalidate_page is called always after, so it enforced the tlb flush
to be called _after_ and so it's inherently safe.