Date:   Fri, 1 Mar 2019 13:39:30 +0000
From:   Steven Price <steven.price@....com>
To:     "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@...temov.name>,
        Mike Rapoport <rppt@...ux.ibm.com>
Cc:     Mark Rutland <Mark.Rutland@....com>, x86@...nel.org,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>,
        Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@...aro.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>,
        Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...ux.intel.com>,
        Will Deacon <will.deacon@....com>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        Jérôme Glisse <jglisse@...hat.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>, Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>,
        "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
        James Morse <james.morse@....com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org,
        "Liang, Kan" <kan.liang@...ux.intel.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 03/13] mm: Add generic p?d_large() macros

On 01/03/2019 12:30, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 01, 2019 at 01:53:01PM +0200, Mike Rapoport wrote:
>> Him Kirill,
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 12:06:18AM +0300, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
>>> On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 05:16:46PM +0000, Steven Price wrote:
>>>>>> Note that in terms of the new page walking code, these new defines are
>>>>>> only used when walking a page table without a VMA (which isn't currently
>>>>>> done), so architectures which don't use p?d_large currently will work
>>>>>> fine with the generic versions. They only need to provide meaningful
>>>>>> definitions when switching to use the walk-without-a-VMA functionality.
>>>>>
>>>>> How other architectures would know that they need to provide the helpers
>>>>> to get walk-without-a-VMA functionality? This looks very fragile to me.
>>>>
>>>> Yes, you've got a good point there. This would apply to the p?d_large
>>>> macros as well - any arch which (inadvertently) uses the generic version
>>>> is likely to be fragile/broken.
>>>>
>>>> I think probably the best option here is to scrap the generic versions
>>>> altogether and simply introduce a ARCH_HAS_PXD_LARGE config option which
>>>> would enable the new functionality to those arches that opt-in. Do you
>>>> think this would be less fragile?
>>>
>>> These helpers are useful beyond pagewalker.
>>>
>>> Can we actually do some grinding and make *all* archs to provide correct
>>> helpers? Yes, it's tedious, but not that bad.
>>
>> Many architectures simply cannot support non-leaf entries at the higher
>> levels. I think letting the use a generic helper actually does make sense.
> 
> I disagree.
> 
> It's makes sense if the level doesn't exists on the arch.

This is what patch 24 [1] of the series does - if the level doesn't
exist then appropriate stubs are provided.

> But if the level exists, it will be less frugile to ask the arch to
> provide the helper. Even if it is dummy always-false.

The problem (as I see it), is we need a reliable set of p?d_large()
implementations to be able to walk arbitrary page tables. Either the
entire functionality of walking page tables without a VMA has to be an
opt-in per architecture, or we need to mandate that every architecture
provide these implementations.

I could provide an asm-generic header to provide a complete set of dummy
implementations for architectures that don't support large pages at all,
but that seems a bit overkill when most architectures only need to
define 2 or 3 implementations (the rest being provided by the
folded-levels automatically).

Thanks,

Steve

[1]
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190227170608.27963-25-steven.price@arm.com/

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