linux-kernel - Re: CPA patchset

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Date:	Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:22:04 +0100
From:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
To:	Andi Kleen <ak@...e.de>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	Venki Pallipadi <venkatesh.pallipadi@...el.com>,
	suresh.b.siddha@...el.com, Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>,
	Dave Jones <davej@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: CPA patchset


* Andi Kleen <ak@...e.de> wrote:

> > What is very real though are the hard limitations of MTRRs. So i'd 
> > rather first like to see a clean PAT approach (which all other 
> > modern OSs have already migrated to in the past 10 years)
> 
> That's mostly orthogonal. Don't know why you bring it up now?

because the PAT (Page Attribute Table support) patchset and the CPA 
(change_page_attr()) patchset are are not orthogonal at all - as their 
name already signals: because they change the implementation/effects of 
the same interface(s). [just at different levels].

Both patchsets change how the kernel pagetable caching is handled. PAT 
changes the kernel pte details and unshackles us from MTRR reliance and 
thus solves real problems on real boxes:

 55 files changed, 1288 insertions(+), 237 deletions(-)

CPA moves change_page_attr() from invwb flushing to cflush flushing, for 
a speedup/latency-win, plus a whole bunch of intermingled fixes and 
improvements to page attribute modification:

 26 files changed, 882 insertions(+), 423 deletions(-)

so in terms of risk management, the "perfect patch order" is:

 - minimal_set of correctness fixes to the highlevel cpa code.

 - ( then any provably NOP cleanups to pave the way. )

 - then change the lowlevel pte code (PAT) to reduce/eliminate the need 
   to have runtime MTRR use

 - then structural improvements/cleanups of the highlevel cpa code

 - then the cflush (optional) performance feature ontop of it.

 - then gigabyte-largepages/TLBs support [new CPU feature that further
   complicates page-attribute management]

All in an easy-to-revert fashion. We _will_ regress here, and this stuff 
is very hard to debug.

	Ingo
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