linux-kernel - Re: mm: mmu_gather: do not define delayed

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Date:   Wed, 16 Nov 2022 09:52:06 -0800
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     Alexander Gordeev <agordeev@...ux.ibm.com>
Cc:     Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        Nadav Amit <nadav.amit@...il.com>,
        Will Deacon <will@...nel.org>,
        Aneesh Kumar <aneesh.kumar@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Nick Piggin <npiggin@...il.com>,
        Heiko Carstens <hca@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Vasily Gorbik <gor@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Sven Schnelle <svens@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@...ux.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: mm: mmu_gather: do not define delayed_rmap if not used

On Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 11:51 PM Alexander Gordeev
<agordeev@...ux.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> In cases the delayed rmap removal is not used (which are
> currently UP and s390) skip delayed_rmap flag and make
> the related code paths no-op.

So I'm not convinced about this patch.

I particularly dislike adding even more #ifdef's around the data
structure - it already is pretty nasty, and it was hard to see where
things were initialized.

The only actual code impact of this is in tlb_next_batch(), which
tests for "do I have delayed rmaps pending, in which case I won't add
new batches". Everything else is already either optimized away, or
just "one bit declared in a structure that already has bitfields and
has room for several extra bits":

And that "I need to allocate new batches" case really doesn't matter
anyway - it's not even build at all on s390, and on UP where it's
there but technically pointless to have the test it really isn't
noticeable.

So the previous patch I was "this shouldn't actually _matter_, but it
does seem cleaner to do it this way".

But _this_ patch makes me go "it still doesn't matter, but now this
patch is actually adding extra infrastructure for the 'not-mattering'
case".

So I don't _hate_ this patch, but I think this actually makes the
current mess wrt our 'struct mmu_gather' worse rather than better.

That structure is already a pain, with horrendous initialization and
different bit-fields having different lifetimes. I'd rather have one
unconditional simple bitfield, than have another bitfield that has
conditional complications.

              Linus