linux-kernel - Re: [patch 1/6] mmu

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Message-ID: <20080130233803.GB7185@v2.random>
Date:	Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:38:03 +0100
From:	Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@...ranet.com>
To:	Robin Holt <holt@....com>
Cc:	Christoph Lameter <clameter@....com>,
	Jack Steiner <steiner@....com>, Avi Kivity <avi@...ranet.com>,
	Izik Eidus <izike@...ranet.com>, Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>,
	kvm-devel@...ts.sourceforge.net,
	Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>,
	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	daniel.blueman@...drics.com, Hugh Dickins <hugh@...itas.com>
Subject: Re: [patch 1/6] mmu_notifier: Core code

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 04:20:35PM -0600, Robin Holt wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 11:19:28AM -0800, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > On Wed, 30 Jan 2008, Jack Steiner wrote:
> > 
> > > Moving to a different lock solves the problem.
> > 
> > Well it gets us back to the issue why we removed the lock. As Robin said 
> > before: If its global then we can have a huge number of tasks contending 
> > for the lock on startup of a process with a large number of ranks. The 
> > reason to go to mmap_sem was that it was placed in the mm_struct and so we 
> > would just have a couple of contentions per mm_struct.
> > 
> > I'll be looking for some other way to do this.
> 
> I think Andrea's original concept of the lock in the mmu_notifier_head
> structure was the best.  I agree with him that it should be a spinlock
> instead of the rw_lock.

BTW, I don't see the scalability concern with huge number of tasks:
the lock is still in the mm, down_write(mm->mmap_sem); oneinstruction;
up_write(mm->mmap_sem) is always going to scale worse than
spin_lock(mm->somethingelse); oneinstruction;
spin_unlock(mm->somethinglese).

Furthermore if we go this route and we don't relay on implicit
serialization of all the mmu notifier users against exit_mmap
(i.e. the mmu notifier user must agree to stop calling
mmu_notifier_register on a mm after the last mmput) the autodisarming
feature will likely have to be removed or it can't possibly be safe to
run mmu_notifier_unregister while mmu_notifier_release runs. With the
auto-disarming feature, there is no way to safely know if
mmu_notifier_unregister has to be called or not. I'm ok with removing
the auto-disarming feature and to have as self-contained-as-possible
locking. Then mmu_notifier_release can just become the
invalidate_all_after and invalidate_all, invalidate_all_before.
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