netdev - Re: [Lsf] [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] Generic page-pool recycle facility?

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite for Android: free password hash cracker in your pocket

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:	Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:20:47 -0400
From:	Matthew Wilcox <willy@...ux.intel.com>
To:	Mel Gorman <mgorman@...hsingularity.net>
Cc:	Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@...hat.com>,
	James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...senPartnership.com>,
	"netdev@...r.kernel.org" <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
	Brenden Blanco <bblanco@...mgrid.com>,
	lsf@...ts.linux-foundation.org, linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>,
	Tom Herbert <tom@...bertland.com>,
	lsf-pc@...ts.linux-foundation.org,
	Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [Lsf] [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] Generic page-pool recycle facility?

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 02:08:27PM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 02:26:39PM +0200, Jesper Dangaard Brouer wrote:
> > On arch's like PowerPC, the DMA API is the bottleneck.  To workaround
> > the cost of DMA calls, NIC driver alloc large order (compound) pages.
> > (dma_map compound page, handout page-fragments for RX ring, and later
> > dma_unmap when last RX page-fragments is seen).
> 
> So, IMO only holding onto the DMA pages is all that is justified but not a
> recycle of order-0 pages built on top of the core allocator. For DMA pages,
> it would take a bit of legwork but the per-cpu allocator could be split
> and converted to hold arbitrary sized pages with a constructer/destructor
> to do the DMA coherency step when pages are taken from or handed back to
> the core allocator. I'm not volunteering to do that unfortunately but I
> estimate it'd be a few days work unless it needs to be per-CPU and NUMA
> aware in which case the memory footprint will be high.

Have "we" tried to accelerate the DMA calls in PowerPC?  For example, it
could hold onto a cache of recently used mappings and recycle them if that
still works.  It trades off a bit of security (a device can continue to DMA
after the memory should no longer be accessible to it) for speed, but then
so does the per-driver hack of keeping pages around still mapped.