Re: [PATCH -v3 1/2] mm: add spurious fault fixing support for huge pmd

David Hildenbrand
2025-10-24T15:57:44Z

On 23.10.25 03:35, Huang Ying wrote:
> The page faults may be spurious because of the racy access to the page
> table. For example, a non-populated virtual page is accessed on 2
> CPUs simultaneously, thus the page faults are triggered on both CPUs.
> However, it's possible that one CPU (say CPU A) cannot find the reason
> for the page fault if the other CPU (say CPU B) has changed the page
> table before the PTE is checked on CPU A. Most of the time, the
> spurious page faults can be ignored safely. However, if the page
> fault is for the write access, it's possible that a stale read-only
> TLB entry exists in the local CPU and needs to be flushed on some
> architectures. This is called the spurious page fault fixing.
>
> In the current kernel, there is spurious fault fixing support for pte,
> but not for huge pmd because no architectures need it. But in the
> next patch in the series, we will change the write protection fault
> handling logic on arm64, so that some stale huge pmd entries may
> remain in the TLB. These entries need to be flushed via the huge pmd
> spurious fault fixing mechanism.
>
> Signed-off-by: Huang Ying <ying.huang@linux.alibaba.com>
> Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
> Cc: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
> Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
> Cc: Lorenzo Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com>
> Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
> Cc: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
> Cc: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com>
> Cc: Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com>
> Cc: Yang Shi <yang@os.amperecomputing.com>
> Cc: "Christoph Lameter (Ampere)" <cl@gentwo.org>
> Cc: Dev Jain <dev.jain@arm.com>
> Cc: Barry Song <baohua@kernel.org>
> Cc: Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@arm.com>
> Cc: Kefeng Wang <wangkefeng.wang@huawei.com>
> Cc: Kevin Brodsky <kevin.brodsky@arm.com>
> Cc: Yin Fengwei <fengwei_yin@linux.alibaba.com>
> Cc: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org
> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org
> ---

Acked-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>

--
Cheers

David / dhildenb