Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: Allow architectures to request 'old' entries when prefaulting

Linus Torvalds
2020-12-09T17:59:48Z

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 8:40 AM Will Deacon <will@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> @@ -3978,8 +3994,17 @@ static vm_fault_t do_fault_around(struct vm_fault *vmf)
>
> /* check if the page fault is solved */
> vmf->pte -= (vmf->address >> PAGE_SHIFT) - (address >> PAGE_SHIFT);
> - if (!pte_none(*vmf->pte))
> - ret = VM_FAULT_NOPAGE;
> + if (pte_none(*vmf->pte))
> + goto out_unlock;
> +
> + if (vmf->flags & FAULT_FLAG_PREFAULT_OLD) {
> + pte_t pte = pte_mkyoung(*vmf->pte);
> + if (ptep_set_access_flags(vmf->vma, address, vmf->pte, pte, 0))
> + update_mmu_cache(vmf->vma, address, vmf->pte);
> + }

Oh, please dear God no.

First you incorrectly set it old, and then you conditionally make it
young again and as a result force an atomic rwm update and another TLB
flush for no good reason.

Just make sure that the FAULT_FLAG_PREFAULT_OLD never sets the
*actual* address to old.

And yes, that probably means that you need to change "alloc_set_pte()"
to actually pass in the real address, and leave "vmf->address" alone -
so that it can know which ones are prefaulted and which one is real,
but that sounds like a good idea anyway.

Then you can just make alloc_set_pte() do the right thing in the first
place, instead of doing this nasty "lets do it wrong and fix it up
later" horror.

Linus