Re: [PATCH] mmu notifiers #v8

[Jack Steiner <steiner@sgi.com>]

On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 02:10:17PM +0100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 01:51:53PM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 04:29:34AM +0100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> > > to something I prefer. Others may not, but I'll post them for debate
> > > anyway.
> > 
> > Sure, thanks!
> > 
> > > > I didn't drop invalidate_page, because invalidate_range_begin/end
> > > > would be slower for usages like KVM/GRU (we don't need a begin/end
> > > > there because where invalidate_page is called, the VM holds a
> > > > reference on the page). do_wp_page should also use invalidate_page
> > > > since it can free the page after dropping the PT lock without losing
> > > > any performance (that's not true for the places where invalidate_range
> > > > is called).
> > > 
> > > I'm still not completely happy with this. I had a very quick look
> > > at the GRU driver, but I don't see why it can't be implemented
> > > more like the regular TLB model, and have TLB insertions depend on
> > > the linux pte, and do invalidates _after_ restricting permissions
> > > to the pte.
> > > 
> > > Ie. I'd still like to get rid of invalidate_range_begin, and get
> > > rid of invalidate calls from places where permissions are relaxed.
> > 
> > _begin exists because by the time _end is called, the VM already
> > dropped the reference on the page. This way we can do a single
> > invalidate no matter how large the range is. I don't see ways to
> > remove _begin while still invoking _end a single time for the whole
> > range.
> 
> Is this just a GRU problem? Can't we just require them to take a ref
> on the page (IIRC Jack said GRU could be changed to more like a TLB
> model).

Maintaining a long-term reference on a page is a problem. The GRU does not
currently maintain tables to track the pages for which dropins have been done.

The GRU has a large internal TLB and is designed to reference up to 8PB of
memory. The size of the tables to track this many referenced pages would be
a problem (at best).