On Tue, Oct 07, 2014 at 05:52:47PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > I probably grossly overestimated the benefits of resolving the > userfault with a zerocopy page move, sorry. [...] For posterity, I think it's worth noting that most expensive aspect of a TLB shootdown is the interprocessor interrupt necessary to flush other CPUs' TLBs. On a many-core machine, copying 4K of data looks pretty cheap compared to taking an interrupt and invalidating TLBs on many cores :-) > [...] So if we entirely drop the > zerocopy behavior and the TLB flush of the old page like you > suggested, the way to keep the userfaultfd mechanism decoupled from > the userfault resolution mechanism would be to implement an > atomic-copy syscall. That would work for SIGBUS userfaults too without > requiring a pseudofd then. It would be enough then to call > mcopy_atomic(userfault_addr,tmp_addr,len) with the only constraints > that len must be a multiple of PAGE_SIZE. Of course mcopy_atomic > wouldn't page fault or call GUP into the destination address (it can't > otherwise the in-flight partial copy would be visible to the process, > breaking the atomicity of the copy), but it would fill in the > pte/trans_huge_pmd with the same strict behavior that remap_anon_pages > currently has (in turn it would by design bypass the VM_USERFAULT > check and be ideal for resolving userfaults). > > mcopy_atomic could then be also extended to tmpfs and it would work > without requiring the source page to be a tmpfs page too without > having to convert page types on the fly. > > If I add mcopy_atomic, the patch in subject (10/17) can be dropped of > course so it'd be even less intrusive than the current > remap_anon_pages and it would require zero TLB flush during its > runtime (it would just require an atomic copy). I like this new approach. It will be good to have a single interface for resolving anon and tmpfs userfaults. > So should I try to embed a mcopy_atomic inside userfault_write or can > I expose it to userland as a standalone new syscall? Or should I do > something different? Comments? One interesting (ab)use of userfault_write would be that the faulting process and the fault-handling process could be different, which would be necessary for post-copy live migration in CRIU (http://criu.org). Aside from the asthetic difference, I can't think of any advantage in favor of a syscall. Peter -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
