linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 09/12] KVM: MMU: introduce pte-list lockless walker

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Date:	Thu, 29 Aug 2013 12:51:20 +0300
From:	Gleb Natapov <gleb@...hat.com>
To:	Xiao Guangrong <xiaoguangrong@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc:	avi.kivity@...il.com, mtosatti@...hat.com, pbonzini@...hat.com,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, kvm@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 09/12] KVM: MMU: introduce pte-list lockless walker

On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 05:31:42PM +0800, Xiao Guangrong wrote:
> > As Documentation/RCU/whatisRCU.txt says:
> > 
> >         As with rcu_assign_pointer(), an important function of
> >         rcu_dereference() is to document which pointers are protected by
> >         RCU, in particular, flagging a pointer that is subject to changing
> >         at any time, including immediately after the rcu_dereference().
> >         And, again like rcu_assign_pointer(), rcu_dereference() is
> >         typically used indirectly, via the _rcu list-manipulation
> >         primitives, such as list_for_each_entry_rcu().
> > 
> > The documentation aspect of rcu_assign_pointer()/rcu_dereference() is
> > important. The code is complicated, so self documentation will not hurt.
> > I want to see what is actually protected by rcu here. Freeing shadow
> > pages with call_rcu() further complicates matters: does it mean that
> > shadow pages are also protected by rcu? 
> 
> Yes, it stops shadow page to be freed when we do write-protection on
> it.
> 
Yeah, I got the trick, what I am saying that we have a data structure
here protected by RCU, but we do not use RCU functions to access it...
BTW why not allocate sp->spt from SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU cache too? We may
switch write protection on a random spt occasionally if page is deleted
and reused for another spt though. For last level spt it should not be a
problem and for non last level we have is_last_spte() check in
__rmap_write_protect_lockless(). Can it work?

--
			Gleb.
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