Re: [PATCH 3/5] Memory hotplug support for arm64 platform (v2)

Mark Rutland
2017-04-11T15:59:11Z

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 03:55:22PM +0100, Andrea Reale wrote:
> From: Maciej Bielski <m.bielski@virtualopensystems.com>
>
> This is a second and improved version of the patch previously released
> in [3].
>
> It builds on the work by Scott Branden [2] and, henceforth,
> it needs to be applied on top of Scott's patches [2].
> Comments are very welcome.
>
> Changes from the original patchset and known issues:
>
> - Compared to Scott's original patchset, this work adds the mapping of
> the new hotplugged pages into the kernel page tables. This is done by
> copying the old swapper_pg_dir over a new page, adding the new mappings,
> and then switching to the newly built pg_dir (see `hotplug_paging` in
> arch/arm64/mmu.c). There might be better ways to to this: suggestions
> are more than welcome.

For this reply, I'm just going to focus on the PGD replacement.

It's not clear to me if we need to swap the PGD, since everything we do
here is strictly additive and non-conflicting, and it should be safe to
add things to the swapper_pg_dir live.

However, assuming there's something I've missed, I have some comments
below.

[...]

> +#ifdef CONFIG_MEMORY_HOTPLUG
> +
> +/*
> + * hotplug_paging() is used by memory hotplug to build new page tables
> + * for hot added memory.
> + */
> +void hotplug_paging(phys_addr_t start, phys_addr_t size)
> +{
> +
> + struct page *pg;
> + phys_addr_t pgd_phys = pgd_pgtable_alloc();
> + pgd_t *pgd = pgd_set_fixmap(pgd_phys);
> +
> + memcpy(pgd, swapper_pg_dir, PAGE_SIZE);

s/PAGE_SIZE/PGD_SIZE/ (and below, too).

See commit 12f043ff2b28fa64 ("arm64: fix warning about swapper_pg_dir
overflow").

> +
> + __create_pgd_mapping(pgd, start, __phys_to_virt(start), size,
> + PAGE_KERNEL, pgd_pgtable_alloc, false);
> +
> + cpu_replace_ttbr1(__va(pgd_phys));

Other CPUs may be online at this point, and cpu_replace_ttbr1() was only
intended for UP operation. Other CPUs will still have swapper_pg_dir in
their TTBR1_EL1 at this point in time...

> + memcpy(swapper_pg_dir, pgd, PAGE_SIZE);

... which this will alter, in an unsafe fashion.

The other CPUs are live, and might be altering swapper. e.g. one might
be using the fixmap to alter code. We will need some stop_machine()-like
machinery here to synchronise with other CPUs, ensuring that they don't
have swapper_pg_dir live.

Unfortunately, we can't change other to the temporary pgdir in a cross
call, then fix things up, then do another cross call. If any exception
is taken when we're in the temporary pgdir, __uaccess_ttbr0_disable will
install junk into TTBR0, and we risk the usual set of pain junk TLBs
entail.

We appear to have a latent bug at boot time along those lines, when
setting up the page tables and initialising KASAN. I'll see about
cleaning that up.

Thanks,
Mark.