On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 06:09:12PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote: > On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 07:00:05PM +0300, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote: > > On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 04:22:29PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote: > > > On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 05:52:22PM +0300, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote: > > > > We need an atomic way to setup pmd page table entry, avoiding races with > > > > CPU setting dirty/accessed bits. This is required to implement > > > > pmdp_invalidate() that doesn't loose these bits. > > > > > > > > On PAE we have to use cmpxchg8b as we cannot assume what is value of new pmd and > > > > setting it up half-by-half can expose broken corrupted entry to CPU. > > > > > > > > Signed-off-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > > > > Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> > > > > Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> > > > > Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > > > > > > I'll look at this from the arm64 perspective. It would be good if we can > > > have a generic atomic implementation based on cmpxchg64 but I need to > > > look at the details first. > > > > Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's possbile. > > > > The format of a page table is defined per-arch. We cannot assume much about > > it in generic code. > > > > I guess we could make it compile by casting to 'unsigned long', but is it > > useful? > > Every architecture manintainer still has to validate that this assumption > > is valid for the architecture. > > You are right, not much gained in doing this. > > Maybe a stupid question but can we not implement pmdp_invalidate() with > something like pmdp_get_and_clear() (usually reusing the ptep_* > equivalent). Or pmdp_clear_flush() (again, reusing ptep_clear_flush())? > > In my quick grep on pmdp_invalidate, it seems to be followed by > set_pmd_at() or pmd_populate() already and the *pmd value after > mknotpresent isn't any different from 0 to the hardware (at least on > ARM). That's unless Linux expects to see some non-zero value here if > walking the page tables on another CPU. The whole reason to have pmdp_invalidate() in first place is to never make pmd clear in the middle. Otherwise we will get race with MADV_DONTNEED. See ced108037c2a for an example of such race. -- Kirill A. Shutemov
