Re: [PATCH RFC v6 05/26] nova-core: mm: Add support to use PRAMIN windows to write to VRAM

Danilo Krummrich
2026-01-28T12:04:16Z

On Fri Jan 23, 2026 at 12:16 AM CET, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> My plan is to make TLB and PRAMIN use immutable references in their function
> calls and then implement internal locking. I've already done this for the GPU
> buddy functions, so it should be doable, and we'll keep it consistent. As a
> result, we will have finer-grain locking on the memory management objects
> instead of requiring to globally lock a common GpuMm object. I'll plan on
> doing this for v7.
>
> Also, the PTE allocation race you mentioned is already handled by PRAMIN
> serialization. Since threads must hold the PRAMIN lock to write page table
> entries, concurrent writers are not possible:
>
> Thread A: acquire PRAMIN lock
> Thread A: read PDE (via PRAMIN) -> NULL
> Thread A: alloc PT page, write PDE
> Thread A: release PRAMIN lock
>
> Thread B: acquire PRAMIN lock
> Thread B: read PDE (via PRAMIN) -> sees A's pointer
> Thread B: uses existing PT page, no allocation needed

This won't work unfortunately.

We have to separate allocations and modifications of the page tabe. Or in other
words, we must not allocate new PDEs or PTEs while holding the lock protecting
the page table from modifications.

Once we have VM_BIND in nova-drm, we will have the situation that userspace
passes jobs to modify the GPUs virtual address space and hence the page tables.

Such a jobs has mainly three stages.

(1) The submit stage.

This is where the job is initialized, dependencies are set up and the
driver has to pre-allocate all kinds of structures that are required
throughout the subsequent stages of the job.

(2) The run stage.

This is the stage where the job is staged for execution and its DMA fence
has been made public (i.e. it is accessible by userspace).

This is the stage where we are in the DMA fence signalling critical
section, hence we can't do any non-atomic allocations, since otherwise we
could deadlock in MMU notifier callbacks for instance.

This is the stage where the page table is actually modified. Hence, we
can't acquire any locks that might be held elsewhere while doing
non-atomic allocations. Also note that this is transitive, e.g. if you
take lock A and somewhere else a lock B is taked while A is already held
and we do non-atomic allocations while holding B, then A can't be held in
the DMA fence signalling critical path either.

It is also worth noting that this is the stage where we know the exact
operations we have to execute based on the VM_BIND request from userspace.

For instance, in the submit stage we may only know that userspace wants
that we map a BO with a certain offset in the GPUs virtual address space
at [0x0, 0x1000000]. What we don't know is what exact operations this does
require, i.e. "What do we have to unmap first?", "Are there any
overlapping mappings that we have to truncate?", etc.

So, we have to consider this when we pre-allocate in the submit stage.

(3) The cleanup stage.

This is where the job has been signaled and hence left the DMA fence
signalling critical section.

In this stage the job is cleaned up, which includes freeing data that is
not required anymore, such as PTEs and PDEs.