[Added Hugh Dickins to the CC list]
Sorry it's taken me so long to reply Dave.
On Mon, 18 Apr 2011 08:02:04 -0700
Dave Hansen <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-04-16 at 10:44 +0100, Matt Fleming wrote:
> > > static inline void pgtable_page_dtor(struct mm_struct *mm, struct page *page)
> > > {
> > > pte_lock_deinit(page);
> > > + dec_mm_counter(mm, MM_PTEPAGES);
> > > dec_zone_page_state(page, NR_PAGETABLE);
> > > }
> >
> > I'm probably missing something really obvious but...
> >
> > Is this safe in the non-USE_SPLIT_PTLOCKS case? If we're not using
> > split-ptlocks then inc/dec_mm_counter() are only safe when done under
> > mm->page_table_lock, right? But it looks to me like we can end up doing,
> >
> > __pte_alloc()
> > pte_alloc_one()
> > pgtable_page_ctor()
> >
> > before acquiring mm->page_table_lock in __pte_alloc().
>
> No, it's probably not safe. We'll have to come up with something a bit
> different in that case. Either that, or just kill the non-atomic case.
> Surely there's some percpu magic counter somewhere in the kernel that is
> optimized for fast (unlocked?) updates and rare, slow reads.
It seems it was Hugh that added these atomics in f412ac08c986 ("[PATCH]
mm: fix rss and mmlist locking").
Hugh, what was the reason that you left the old counters around (the
ones protected by page_table_lock)? It seems to me that we could
delete those and just have the single case that uses the atomic_t
operations.
Would anyone object to a patch that removed the non-atomic case?
--
Matt Fleming, Intel Open Source Technology Center
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