On Wed, 2018-08-22 at 20:59 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 8:45 PM Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > powerpc/radix has no such issue, it already does this tracking. > > Yeah, I now realize that this was why you wanted to add that hacky > thing to the generic code, so that you can add the tlb_flush_pgtable() > call. > > I thought it was because powerpc had some special flush instruction > for it, and the regular tlb flush didn't do it. But no. It was because > the regular code had lost the tlb flush _entirely_, because powerpc > didn't want it. Heh :-) Well, back on hash we didn't (we do now with Radix) but I wouldn't blame us for the generic code being broken ... the RCU table freeing was in arch/powerpc at the time :-) I don't think it was us making it generic :) > > We were discussing this a couple of months ago, I wasn't aware of ARM's > > issue but I suggested x86 could go the same way as powerpc. > > The problem is that x86 _used_ to do this all correctly long long ago. > > And then we switched over to the "generic" table flushing (which > harkens back to the powerpc code). Yes, we wrote it the RCU stuff to solve the races with SW walking, which is completely orthogonal with HW walking & TLB content. We didn't do the move to generic code though ;-) > Which actually turned out to be not generic at all, and did not flush > the internal pages like x86 used to (back when x86 just used > tlb_remove_page for everything). Well, having RCU do the flushing is rather generic, it makes sense whenever there's somebody doing a SW walk *and* you don't have IPIs to synchronize your flushes (ie, anybody with HW TLB invalidation broadcast basically, so ARM and us). > So as a result, x86 had unintentionally lost the TLB flush we used to > have, because tlb_remove_table() had lost the tlb flushing because of > a powerpc quirk. This is a somewhat odd way of putting the "blame" :-) But yeah ok... > You then added it back as a hacky per-architecture hook (apparently > having realized that you never did it at all), which didn't fix the > unintentional lack of flushing on x86. > > So now we're going to do it right. No more "oh, powerpc didn't need > to flush because the hash tables weren't in the tlb at all" thing in > the generic code that then others need to work around. So we do need a different flush instruction for the page tables vs. the normal TLB pages. Cheers, Ben.