Re: Fwd: Re: struct page field arrangement

[Keir Fraser <keir@xensource.com>]

On 16/3/07 11:58, "Jan Beulich" <jbeulich@novell.com> wrote:

>> Since the pin/unpin walking only cares about pgd/pud/pmd entries,
>> synchronization
>> is guaranteed through mm->page_table_lock. The pte lock is used only for leaf
>> entries, which are of no concern to (un)pinning.
> 
> I'm afraid I have to correct myself. Stress testing has shown severe
> problems, and after a few hours of staring at this I'm almost certain there
> is a race condition here: While no new pte-s can ever appear, the logic in
> mm/vmscan.c may try to modify pte-s in an mm currently being unpinned
> (at least through ptep_clear_flush_young() called from
> page_referenced_one() in mm/rmap.c). If this happens when
> xen_pgd_unpin() has already passed the respective pte page, but
> mm_walk() hasn't reached the page, yet, the update will fail (if done
> directly, ptwr will no pick this up, and if done through a hypercall, the
> call would fail, likely producing a BUG()).

What kind of stress test did you run? I was expecting that unpin would be
okay because we only call mm_unpin() from _arch_exit_mmap() if the mm_count
is 1 (which I believe means the mm is not active in any task).

 -- Keir