Re: [RFC PATCH 0/7] mm: Get rid of vmalloc_sync_(un)mappings()

Peter Zijlstra
2020-05-09T09:25:38Z

On Fri, May 08, 2020 at 11:34:07PM +0200, Joerg Roedel wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> thanks for reviewing this!
>
> On Fri, May 08, 2020 at 09:20:00PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > The only concern I have is the pgd_lock lock hold times.
> >
> > By not doing on-demand faults anymore, and consistently calling
> > sync_global_*(), we iterate that pgd_list thing much more often than
> > before if I'm not mistaken.
>
> Should not be a problem, from what I have seen this function is not
> called often on x86-64. The vmalloc area needs to be synchronized at
> the top-level there, which is by now P4D (with 4-level paging). And the
> vmalloc area takes 64 entries, when all of them are populated the
> function will not be called again.

Right; it's just that the moment you do trigger it, it'll iterate that
pgd_list and that is potentially huge. Then again, that's not a new
problem.

I suppose we can deal with it if/when it becomes an actual problem.

I had a quick look and I think it might be possible to make it an RCU
managed list. We'd have to remove the pgd_list entry in
put_task_struct_rcu_user(). Then we can play games in sync_global_*()
and use RCU iteration. New tasks (which can be missed in the RCU
iteration) will already have a full clone of the PGD anyway.

But like said, something for later I suppose.