linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 10/10] mm,sched: conditionally skip lazy TLB mm refcounting

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Date:   Sat, 28 Jul 2018 21:21:17 -0700
From:   Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>
To:     Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com>
Cc:     LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        kernel-team <kernel-team@...com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Andrew Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>, X86 ML <x86@...nel.org>,
        Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@...hat.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>, Mike Galbraith <efault@....de>,
        Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...el.com>, will.daecon@....com,
        Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>,
        Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 10/10] mm,sched: conditionally skip lazy TLB mm refcounting

On Sat, Jul 28, 2018 at 2:53 PM, Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com> wrote:
> Conditionally skip lazy TLB mm refcounting. When an architecture has
> CONFIG_ARCH_NO_ACTIVE_MM_REFCOUNTING enabled, an mm that is used in
> lazy TLB mode anywhere will get shot down from exit_mmap, and there
> in no need to incur the cache line bouncing overhead of refcounting
> a lazy TLB mm.

Unless I've misunderstood something, this patch results in idle tasks
whose active_mm has been freed still having active_mm pointing at
freed memory.  This isn't strictly speaking a bug, but it's extremely
confusing and risks all kinds of nasty errors.  That's why I prefer
the approach of actually removing the active_mm field on x86 rather
than merely removing the refcount.

I realize that this will add more ifdeffery and make the patch a bit
bigger, but I think it'll be much more robust.  Not to mention that it
will save a pointer an a refcount per mm_struct, but that barely
matters.