Last submit didn't go into -mm/3.19-rc, no prob but here I retry (possibly too early for 3.20-rc but I don't expect breakages in this area post -rc4) after a rebase on upstream. FAULT_FOLL_ALLOW_RETRY allows the page fault to drop the mmap_sem for reading to reduce the mmap_sem contention (for writing), like while waiting for I/O completion. The problem is that right now practically no get_user_pages call uses FAULT_FOLL_ALLOW_RETRY, so we're not leveraging that nifty feature. Andres fixed it for the KVM page fault. However get_user_pages_fast remains uncovered, and 99% of other get_user_pages aren't using it either (the only exception being FOLL_NOWAIT in KVM which is really nonblocking and in fact it doesn't even release the mmap_sem). So this patchsets extends the optimization Andres did in the KVM page fault to the whole kernel. It makes most important places (including gup_fast) to use FAULT_FOLL_ALLOW_RETRY to reduce the mmap_sem hold times during I/O. The only few places that remains uncovered are drivers like v4l and other exceptions that tends to work on their own memory and they're not working on random user memory (for example like O_DIRECT that uses gup_fast and is fully covered by this patch). A follow up patch should probably also add a printk_once warning to get_user_pages that should go obsolete and be phased out eventually. The "vmas" parameter of get_user_pages makes it fundamentally incompatible with FAULT_FOLL_ALLOW_RETRY (vmas array becomes meaningless the moment the mmap_sem is released). While this is just an optimization, this becomes an absolute requirement for the userfaultfd feature http://lwn.net/Articles/615086/ . The userfaultfd allows to block the page fault, and in order to do so I need to drop the mmap_sem first. So this patch also ensures that all memory where userfaultfd could be registered by KVM, the very first fault (no matter if it is a regular page fault, or a get_user_pages) always has FAULT_FOLL_ALLOW_RETRY set. Then the userfaultfd blocks and it is waken only when the pagetable is already mapped. The second fault attempt after the wakeup doesn't need FAULT_FOLL_ALLOW_RETRY, so it's ok to retry without it. Thanks, Andrea Andrea Arcangeli (5): mm: gup: add get_user_pages_locked and get_user_pages_unlocked mm: gup: add __get_user_pages_unlocked to customize gup_flags mm: gup: use get_user_pages_unlocked within get_user_pages_fast mm: gup: use get_user_pages_unlocked mm: gup: kvm use get_user_pages_unlocked arch/mips/mm/gup.c | 8 +- arch/s390/mm/gup.c | 6 +- arch/sh/mm/gup.c | 6 +- arch/sparc/mm/gup.c | 6 +- arch/x86/mm/gup.c | 7 +- drivers/media/pci/ivtv/ivtv-udma.c | 6 +- drivers/scsi/st.c | 7 +- drivers/video/fbdev/pvr2fb.c | 6 +- include/linux/kvm_host.h | 11 -- include/linux/mm.h | 11 ++ mm/gup.c | 203 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--- mm/nommu.c | 33 ++++++ mm/process_vm_access.c | 7 +- mm/util.c | 10 +- net/ceph/pagevec.c | 6 +- virt/kvm/async_pf.c | 2 +- virt/kvm/kvm_main.c | 50 +-------- 17 files changed, 261 insertions(+), 124 deletions(-) -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>