On Sun, May 08, 2022 at 04:58:51PM +0800, Baolin Wang wrote: > As Mike pointed out [1], the huge_ptep_get() will only return one specific > pte value for the CONT-PTE or CONT-PMD size hugetlb on ARM64 system, which > will not take into account the subpages' dirty or young bits of a CONT-PTE/PMD > size hugetlb page. That will make us miss dirty or young flags of a CONT-PTE/PMD > size hugetlb page for those functions that want to check the dirty or > young flags of a hugetlb page. For example, the gather_hugetlb_stats() will > get inaccurate dirty hugetlb page statistics, and the DAMON for hugetlb monitoring > will also get inaccurate access statistics. > > To fix this issue, one approach is that we can define an ARM64 specific huge_ptep_get() > implementation, which will take into account any subpages' dirty or young bits. > However we should add a new parameter for ARM64 specific huge_ptep_get() to check > how many continuous PTEs or PMDs in this CONT-PTE/PMD size hugetlb, that means we > should convert all the places using huge_ptep_get(), meanwhile most places using > huge_ptep_get() did not care about the dirty or young flags at all. > > So instead of changing the prototype of huge_ptep_get(), this patch set introduces > a new huge_ptep_get_access_flags() interface and define an ARM64 specific implementation, > that will take into account any subpages' dirty or young bits for CONT-PTE/PMD size > hugetlb page. And we can only change to use huge_ptep_get_access_flags() for those > functions that care about the dirty or young flags of a hugetlb page. I question whether this is the right approach. I understand that different hardware implementations have different requirements here, but at least one that I'm aware of (AMD Zen 2/3) requires that all PTEs that are part of a contig PTE must have identical A/D bits. Now, you could say that's irrelevant because it's x86 and we don't currently support contPTE on x86, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that other hardware has the same requirement. So what if we make that a Linux requirement? Setting a contPTE dirty or accessed becomes a bit more expensive (although still one/two cachelines, so not really much more expensive than a single write). Then there's no need to change the "get" side of things because they're always identical. It does mean that we can't take advantage of hardware setting A/D bits, unless hardware can be persuaded to behave this way. I don't have any ARM specs in front of me to check. I don't have a hard objection to your approach, I just want to discuss other possibilities.
