On Fri, 06 Jul 2018 13:03:55 -0400
Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> It looks like last summer, there were 2 sets of patches
> in flight to fix the issue of simultaneous mprotect/madvise
> calls unmapping PTEs, and some pages not being flushed from
> the TLB before returning to userspace.
>
> Minchan posted these patches:
> 56236a59556c ("mm: refactor TLB gathering API")
> 99baac21e458 ("mm: fix MADV_[FREE|DONTNEED] TLB flush miss problem")
>
> Around the same time, Mel posted:
> 4647706ebeee ("mm: always flush VMA ranges affected by zap_page_range")
>
> They both appear to solve the same bug.
>
> Only one of the two solutions is needed.
>
> However, 4647706ebeee appears to introduce extra TLB
> flushes - one per VMA, instead of one over the entire
> range unmapped, and also extra flushes when there are
> no simultaneous unmappers of the same mm.
>
> For that reason, it seems like we should revert
> 4647706ebeee and keep only Minchan's solution in
> the kernel.
>
> Am I overlooking any reason why we should not revert
> 4647706ebeee?
Yes I think so. Discussed here recently:
https://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=152878780528037&w=2
Actually we realized that powerpc does not implement the mmu
gather flushing quite right so it needs a fix before this
revert. But I propose the revert for next merge window.
Thanks,
Nick
