linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH] introduce sys_membarrier(): process-wide memory barrier (v3a)

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Date:	Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:48:56 -0500
From:	Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@...ymtl.ca>
To:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
Cc:	"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>, akpm@...ux-foundation.org,
	josh@...htriplett.org, tglx@...utronix.de, Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu,
	dhowells@...hat.com, laijs@...fujitsu.com, dipankar@...ibm.com,
	"David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] introduce sys_membarrier(): process-wide memory
	barrier (v3a)

* Peter Zijlstra (peterz@...radead.org) wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-01-11 at 17:04 -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> > * Peter Zijlstra (peterz@...radead.org) wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2010-01-11 at 15:52 -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > So the clear bit can occur far, far away in the future, we don't care.
> > > > We'll just send extra IPIs when unneeded in this time-frame.
> > > 
> > > I think we should try harder not to disturb CPUs, particularly in the
> > > face of RT tasks and DoS scenarios. Therefore I don't think we should
> > > just wildly send to mm_cpumask(), but verify (although speculatively)
> > > that the remote tasks' mm matches ours.
> > > 
> > 
> > Well, my point of view is that if IPI TLB shootdown does not care about
> > disturbing CPUs running other processes in the time window of the lazy
> > removal, why should we ?
> 
> while (1)
>  sys_membarrier();
> 
> is a very good reason, TLB shootdown doesn't have that problem.
> 
> >  We're adding an overhead very close to that of
> > an unrequired IPI shootdown which returns immediately without doing
> > anything.
> 
> Except we don't clear the mask.
> 

Good point. And I'm not so confident that clearing it ourself would be
safe in any way.

> > The tradeoff here seems to be:
> > - more overhead within switch_mm() for more precise mm_cpumask.
> > vs
> > - lazy removal of the cpumask, which implies that some processors
> >   running a different process can receive the IPI for nothing.
> > 
> > I really doubt we could create an IPI DoS based on such a small
> > time window.
> 
> What small window? When there's less runnable tasks than available mm
> contexts some architectures can go quite a long while without
> invalidating TLBs.

OK.

> 
> So what again is wrong with:
> 
>  int cpu, this_cpu = get_cpu();
> 
>  smp_mb(); 
> 
>  for_each_cpu(cpu, mm_cpumask(current->mm)) {
>    if (cpu == this_cpu)
>      continue;
>    if (cpu_curr(cpu)->mm != current->mm)
>      continue;
>    smp_send_call_function_single(cpu, do_mb, NULL, 1);
>  }
> 
>  put_cpu();
> 
> ?
> 

Almost. Missing smp_mb() at the end. We also have to specify that the
smp_mb() we plan to require in switch_mm() should now surround:

- clear mask
- set mask
- ->mm update

Or, for a simpler way to protect ->mm read, we can go with the runqueue
spinlock.

Also, I'd like to use a send-to-many IPI rather than sending to single
CPUs one by one, because the former has a much better scalability for
architectures supporting IPI broadcast. This, however, implies
allocating a temporary cpumask.

Thanks,

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F  BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68
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