On Tue, 13 Mar 2018, Laurent Dufour wrote: > This change is inspired by the Peter's proposal patch [1] which was > protecting the VMA using SRCU. Unfortunately, SRCU is not scaling well in > that particular case, and it is introducing major performance degradation > due to excessive scheduling operations. > > To allow access to the mm_rb tree without grabbing the mmap_sem, this patch > is protecting it access using a rwlock. As the mm_rb tree is a O(log n) > search it is safe to protect it using such a lock. The VMA cache is not > protected by the new rwlock and it should not be used without holding the > mmap_sem. > > To allow the picked VMA structure to be used once the rwlock is released, a > use count is added to the VMA structure. When the VMA is allocated it is > set to 1. Each time the VMA is picked with the rwlock held its use count > is incremented. Each time the VMA is released it is decremented. When the > use count hits zero, this means that the VMA is no more used and should be > freed. > > This patch is preparing for 2 kind of VMA access : > - as usual, under the control of the mmap_sem, > - without holding the mmap_sem for the speculative page fault handler. > > Access done under the control the mmap_sem doesn't require to grab the > rwlock to protect read access to the mm_rb tree, but access in write must > be done under the protection of the rwlock too. This affects inserting and > removing of elements in the RB tree. > > The patch is introducing 2 new functions: > - vma_get() to find a VMA based on an address by holding the new rwlock. > - vma_put() to release the VMA when its no more used. > These services are designed to be used when access are made to the RB tree > without holding the mmap_sem. > > When a VMA is removed from the RB tree, its vma->vm_rb field is cleared and > we rely on the WMB done when releasing the rwlock to serialize the write > with the RMB done in a later patch to check for the VMA's validity. > > When free_vma is called, the file associated with the VMA is closed > immediately, but the policy and the file structure remained in used until > the VMA's use count reach 0, which may happens later when exiting an > in progress speculative page fault. > > [1] https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/5108281/ > > Cc: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Signed-off-by: Laurent Dufour <ldufour@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Can __free_vma() be generalized for mm/nommu.c's delete_vma() and do_mmap()?
