Re: [RFC 1/3] lib: copy_{from,to}_user using gup & kmap_atomic()

Arnd Bergmann
2020-06-13T20:45:54Z

On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 2:04 PM afzal mohammed <afzal.mohd.ma@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 10:07:28PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>
> > I think a lot
> > of usercopy calls are only for a few bytes, though this is of course
> > highly workload dependent and you might only care about the large
> > ones.
>
> Observation is that max. pages reaching copy_{from,to}_user() is 2,
> observed maximum of n (number of bytes) being 1 page size. i think C
> library cuts any size read, write to page size (if it exceeds) &
> invokes the system call. Max. pages reaching 2, happens when 'n'
> crosses page boundary, this has been observed w/ small size request
> as well w/ ones of exact page size (but not page aligned).

Right, this is apparently because tmpfs uses shmem_file_read_iter() to
copy the file pages one at a time. generic_file_buffered_read() seems
similar, to copying between an aligned kernel page and address in
user space that is not page aligned would be an important case to
optimize for.

> Quickly comparing boot-time on Beagle Bone White, boot time increases
> by only 4%, perhaps this worry is irrelevant, but just thought will
> put it across.

4% boot time increase sounds like a lot, especially if that is only for
copy_from_user/copy_to_user. In the end it really depends on how well
get_user()/put_user() and small copies can be optimized in the end.

> > There is also still hope of optimizing small aligned copies like
> >
> > set_ttbr0(user_ttbr);
> > ldm();
> > set_ttbr0(kernel_ttbr);
> > stm();
>
> Hmm, more needs to be done to be in a position to test it.

This is going to be highly microarchitecture specific, so anything you test
on the Beaglebone's Cortex-A8 might not apply to A7/A15/A17 systems,
but if you want to test what the overhead is, you could try changing
/dev/zero (or a different chardev like it) to use a series of
put_user(0, u32uptr++) in place of whatever it has, and then replace the
'str' instruction with dummy writes to ttbr0 using the value it already
has, like:

mcr p15, 0, %0, c2, c0, 0 /* set_ttbr0() */
isb /* prevent speculative access to kernel table */
str %1, [%2],0 /* write 32 bit to user space */
mcr p15, 0, %0, c2, c0, 0 /* set_ttbr0() */
isb /* prevent speculative access to user table */

This is obviously going to be very slow compared to the simple store
there is today but maybe cheaper than the
CONFIG_ARM64_SW_TTBR0_PAN uaccess_en/disable()
on arm64 on a single get_user()/put_user().

It would be interesting to compare it to the overhead of a
get_user_page_fast() based implementation. From the numbers you
measured, it seems the beaglebone currently needs an extra ~6µs or
3µs per copy_to/from_user() call with your patch, depending on what
your benchmark was (MB/s for just reading or writing vs MB/s for
copying from one file to another through a user space buffer).

Arnd