Re: [patch 2/2]: introduce fast_gup

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Peter Zijlstra wrote:
On Mon, 2008-04-21 at 15:00 +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
Linus Torvalds wrote:
Finally, I don't think that comment is correct in the first place. It's not that simple. The thing is, even *with* the memory barrier in place, we may have:

	CPU#1			CPU#2
	=====			=====

	fast_gup:
	 - read low word

				native_set_pte_present:
				 - set low word to 0
				 - set high word to new value

	 - read high word

				- set low word to new value

and so you read a low word that is associated with a *different* high word! Notice?

So trivial memory ordering is _not_ enough.

So I think the code literally needs to be something like this

	#ifdef CONFIG_X86_PAE

	static inline pte_t native_get_pte(pte_t *ptep)
	{
		pte_t pte;

	retry:
		pte.pte_low = ptep->pte_low;
		smp_rmb();
		pte.pte_high = ptep->pte_high;
		smp_rmb();
		if (unlikely(pte.pte_low != ptep->pte_low)
			goto retry;
		return pte;
	}

I think this is still broken. Suppose that after reading pte_high native_set_pte() is called again on another cpu, changing pte_low back to the original value (but with a different pte_high). You now have pte_low from second native_set_pte() but pte_high from the first native_set_pte().

I think the idea was that for user pages we only use set_pte_present()
which does the low=0 thing first.

Doesn't matter. The second native_set_pte() (or set_pte_present()) executes atomically:


	fast_gup:
	 - read low word (l0)

				native_set_pte_present:
				 - set low word to 0
				 - set high word to new value (h1)
	 			 - set low word to new value (l1)


	 - read high word (h1)

				native_set_pte_present:
				 - set low word to 0
				 - set high word to new value (h2)
	 			 - set low word to new value (l2)

  	 - re-read low word (l2)


If l2 happens to be equal to l0, then the check succeeds and we have a splintered pte h1:l0.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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