On 11/06/2018 06:05 AM, Will Deacon wrote: > On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 11:45:00AM +0530, Anshuman Khandual wrote: >> On 10/17/2018 07:39 AM, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: >>> What we need to do during split is an invalidate of the huge TLB. >>> There's no pmd_trans_splitting anymore, so we only clear the present >>> bit in the PTE despite pmd_present still returns true (just like >>> PROT_NONE, nothing new in this respect). pmd_present never meant the >> >> On arm64, the problem is that pmd_present() is tied with pte_present() which >> checks for PTE_VALID (also PTE_PROT_NONE) but which gets cleared during PTE >> invalidation. pmd_present() returns false just after the first step of PMD >> splitting. So pmd_present() needs to be decoupled from PTE_VALID which is >> same as PMD_SECT_VALID and instead should depend upon a pte bit which sticks >> around like PAGE_PSE as in case of x86. I am working towards a solution. > > Could we not just go via a PROT_NONE mapping during the split, instead of > having to allocate a new software bit to treat these invalid ptes as > present? The problem might occur during page fault (i.e __handle_mm_fault). As discussed previously on this thread any potential PTE sticky bit would be used for both pmd_trans_huge() and pmd_present() wrappers to maintain existing semantics. At present, PMD state analysis during page fault has conditional block like this. if (pmd_trans_huge(orig_pmd) || pmd_devmap(orig_pmd)) { if (pmd_protnone(orig_pmd) && vma_is_accessible(vma)) return do_huge_pmd_numa_page(&vmf, orig_pmd); Using PROT_NONE for pmd_trans_huge() might force PMD page fault to go through NUMA fault handling all the time as both pmd_trans_huge() and pmd_protnone() will return true in that situation.