[PATCH v2 2/2] x86/mm: implement free pmd/pte page interfaces

[toshi.kani@hpe.com (Kani, Toshi)]

On Thu, 2018-04-26 at 22:07 +0200, joro at 8bytes.org wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 05:49:58PM +0000, Kani, Toshi wrote:
> > On Thu, 2018-04-26 at 19:23 +0200, joro at 8bytes.org wrote:
> > > So the PMD entry you clear can still be in a page-walk cache and this
> > > needs to be flushed too before you can free the PTE page. Otherwise
> > > page-walks might still go to the page you just freed. That is especially
> > > bad when the page is already reallocated and filled with other data.
> > 
> > I do not understand why we need to flush processor caches here. x86
> > processor caches are coherent with MESI.  So, clearing an PMD entry
> > modifies a cache entry on the processor associated with the address,
> > which in turn invalidates all stale cache entries on other processors.
> 
> A page walk cache is not about the processors data cache, its a cache
> similar to the TLB to speed up page-walks by caching intermediate
> results of previous page walks.

Thanks for the clarification. After reading through SDM one more time, I
agree that we need a TLB purge here. Here is my current understanding. 

 - INVLPG purges both TLB and paging-structure caches. So, PMD cache was
purged once.
 - However, processor may cache this PMD entry later in speculation
since it has p-bit set. (This is where my misunderstanding was.
Speculation is not allowed to access a target address, but it may still
cache this PMD entry.)
 - A single INVLPG on each processor purges this PMD cache. It does not
need a range purge (which was already done).

Does it sound right to you?

As for the BUG_ON issue, are you able to reproduce this issue?  If so,
would you be able to test the fix?

Regards,
-Toshi