Re: [patch 2/6] mmu_notifier: Callbacks to invalidate address ranges

Christoph Lameter
2008-01-29T22:56:17Z

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> But now I think there may be an issue with a third thread that may
> show unsafe the removal of invalidate_page from ptep_clear_flush.
>
> A third thread writing to a page through the linux-pte and the guest
> VM writing to the same page through the sptes, will be writing on the
> same physical page concurrently and using an userspace spinlock w/o
> ever entering the kernel. With your patch that invalidate_range after
> dropping the PT lock, the third thread may start writing on the new
> page, when the guest is still writing to the old page through the
> sptes. While this couldn't happen with my patch.

A user space spinlock plays into this??? That is irrelevant to the kernel.
And we are discussing "your" placement of the invalidate_range not mine.

This is the scenario that I described before. You just need two threads.
One thread is in do_wp_page and the other is writing through the spte.
We are in do_wp_page. Meaning the page is not writable. The writer will
have to take fault which will properly serialize access. It a bug if the
spte would allow write.