linux-kernel - Re: [patch] my mmu notifiers

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Message-ID: <20080221044704.GB15215@wotan.suse.de>
Date:	Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:47:04 +0100
From:	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>
To:	Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@...ranet.com>
Cc:	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, Robin Holt <holt@....com>,
	Avi Kivity <avi@...ranet.com>, Izik Eidus <izike@...ranet.com>,
	kvm-devel@...ts.sourceforge.net,
	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	general@...ts.openfabrics.org,
	Steve Wise <swise@...ngridcomputing.com>,
	Roland Dreier <rdreier@...co.com>,
	Kanoj Sarcar <kanojsarcar@...oo.com>, steiner@....com,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	daniel.blueman@...drics.com, Christoph Lameter <clameter@....com>
Subject: Re: [patch] my mmu notifiers

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 02:09:41AM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 12:11:57AM +0100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> > Sorry, I realise I still didn't get this through my head yet (and also
> > have not seen your patch recently). So I don't know exactly what you
> > are doing...
> 
> The last version was posted here:
> 
> http://marc.info/?l=kvm-devel&m=120321732521533&w=2
> 
> > But why does _anybody_ (why does Christoph's patches) need to invalidate
> > when they are going to be more permissive? This should be done lazily by
> > the driver, I would have thought.
> 
> This can be done lazily by the driver yes. The place where I've an
> invalidate_pages in mprotect however can also become less permissive.

That's OK, because we have to flush tlbs there too.


> It's simpler to invalidate always and it's not guaranteed the
> secondary mmu page fault is capable of refreshing the spte across a
> writeprotect fault.

I think we just have to make sure that it _can_ do writeprotect
faults. AFAIKS, that will be possible if the driver registers a
.page_mkwrite handler (actually not quite -- page_mkwrite is fairly
crap, so I have a patch to merge it together with .fault so we get
address information as well). Anyway, I really think we should do
it that way.

> In the future this can be changed to
> mprotect_pages though, so no page fault will happen in the secondary
> mmu.

Possibly, but hopefully not needed for performance. Let's wait and
see.
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