linux-kernel - Re: [RFC][PATCH 4/6] arm, mm: Convert arm to generic tlb

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Message-ID: <20120517172215.GB11487@flint.arm.linux.org.uk>
Date:	Thu, 17 May 2012 18:22:15 +0100
From:	Russell King <rmk@....linux.org.uk>
To:	Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>
Cc:	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	Paul Mundt <lethal@...ux-sh.org>,
	Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	"akpm@...ux-foundation.org" <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-arch@...r.kernel.org" <linux-arch@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-mm@...ck.org" <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>,
	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>,
	Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@...cali.co.uk>,
	Mel Gorman <mel@....ul.ie>, Nick Piggin <npiggin@...nel.dk>,
	Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@...era.com>,
	Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@...ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH 4/6] arm, mm: Convert arm to generic tlb

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 05:00:12PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 12:28:06PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Thu, 2012-05-17 at 10:51 +0100, Russell King wrote:
> > > On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 10:30:23AM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > > Another minor thing is that on newer ARM processors (Cortex-A15) we
> > > > need the TLB shootdown even on UP systems, so tlb_fast_mode should
> > > > always return 0. Something like below (untested):
> > > 
> > > No Catalin, we need this for virtually all ARMv7 CPUs whether they're UP
> > > or SMP, not just for A15, because of the speculative prefetch which can
> > > re-load TLB entries from the page tables at _any_ time.
> > 
> > Hmm,. so this is mostly because of the confusion/coupling between
> > tlb_remove_page() and tlb_remove_table() I guess. Since I don't see the
> > freeing of the actual pages being a problem with speculative TLB
> > reloads, just the page-tables.
> > 
> > Should we introduce a tlb_remove_table() regardless of
> > HAVE_RCU_TABLE_FREE which always queues the tables regardless of
> > tlb_fast_mode()? 
> 
> BTW, looking at your tlb-unify branch, does tlb_remove_table() call
> tlb_flush/tlb_flush_mmu before freeing the tables?  I can only see
> tlb_remove_page() doing this. On ARM, even UP, we need the TLB flushing
> after clearing the pmd and before freeing the pte page table (and
> ideally doing it less often than at every pte_free_tlb() call).

Catalin,

The way TLB shootdown stuff works is that _every_ single bit of memory
which gets freed, whether its a page or a page table, gets added to a
list of pages to be freed.

So, the sequence is:
- remove pte/pmd/pud/pgd pointers
- add pages, whether they be pages pointed to by pte entries or page tables
  to be freed to a list
- when list is sufficiently full, invalidate TLBs
- free list of pages

That means the pages will not be freed, whether it be a page mapped
into userspace or a page table until such time that the TLB has been
invalidated.

For page tables, this is done via pXX_free_tlb(), which then calls out
to the arch specific __pXX_free_tlb(), which ultimately then hands the
page table over to tlb_remove_page() to add to the list of to-be-freed
pages.

-- 
Russell King
 Linux kernel    2.6 ARM Linux   - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
 maintainer of:
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