linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 4/5] mm: Do early cow for pinned pages during fork() for ptes

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Date:   Mon, 21 Sep 2020 23:55:06 +0200
From:   Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com>
To:     Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com>
Cc:     Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        kernel list <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>,
        Kirill Shutemov <kirill@...temov.name>,
        Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
        Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@...tuozzo.com>,
        Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
        Leon Romanovsky <leonro@...dia.com>, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>,
        John Hubbard <jhubbard@...dia.com>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@...pe.ca>,
        Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/5] mm: Do early cow for pinned pages during fork() for ptes

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 11:20 PM Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com> wrote:
> This patch is greatly inspired by the discussions on the list from Linus, Jason
> Gunthorpe and others [1].
>
> It allows copy_pte_range() to do early cow if the pages were pinned on the
> source mm.  Currently we don't have an accurate way to know whether a page is
> pinned or not.  The only thing we have is page_maybe_dma_pinned().  However
> that's good enough for now.  Especially, with the newly added mm->has_pinned
> flag to make sure we won't affect processes that never pinned any pages.

To clarify: This patch only handles pin_user_pages() callers and
doesn't try to address other GUP users, right? E.g. if task A uses
process_vm_write() on task B while task B is going through fork(),
that can still race in such a way that the written data only shows up
in the child and not in B, right?

I dislike the whole pin_user_pages() concept because (as far as I
understand) it fundamentally tries to fix a problem in the subset of
cases that are more likely to occur in practice (long-term pins
overlapping with things like writeback), and ignores the rarer cases
("short-term" GUP).