Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm/migrate_device.c: Copy pte dirty bit to page

[Alistair Popple <apopple@nvidia.com>]

huang ying <huang.ying.caritas@gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 10:33 AM Alistair Popple <apopple@nvidia.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> huang ying <huang.ying.caritas@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > Hi, Alistair,
>> >
>> > On Fri, Aug 12, 2022 at 1:23 PM Alistair Popple <apopple@nvidia.com> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>>
>> > And I don't know why we use ptep_get_and_clear() to clear PTE if
>> > (!anon_exclusive).  Why don't we need to flush the TLB?
>>
>> We do the TLB flush at the end if anything was modified:
>>
>>         /* Only flush the TLB if we actually modified any entries */
>>         if (unmapped)
>>                 flush_tlb_range(walk->vma, start, end);
>>
>> Obviously I don't think that will work correctly now given we have to
>> read the dirty bits and clear the PTE atomically. I assume it was
>> originally written this way for some sort of performance reason.
>
> Thanks for pointing this out.  If there were parallel page table
> operations such as mprotect() or munmap(), the delayed TLB flushing
> mechanism here may have some problem.  Please take a look at the
> comments of flush_tlb_batched_pending() and TLB flush batching
> implementation in try_to_unmap_one().  We may need to flush TLB with
> page table lock held or use a mechanism similar to that in
> try_to_unmap_one().

Thanks for the pointers. I agree there is likely also a problem here
with the delayed TLB flushing. v2 of this patch deals with this by
always flushing the TLB using ptep_flush_clear(), similar to how
try_to_migrate_one() works. It looks like it could be worth
investigating using batched TLB flushing for both this and
try_to_migrate(), but I will leave that for a future optimisation.

> Best Regards,
> Huang, Ying