Re: [EXT] Re: [PATCH v4 00/13] "Task_isolation" mode

Alex Belits
2020-07-23T15:42:33Z

On Thu, 2020-07-23 at 16:29 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> .
>
> This.. as presented it is an absolutely unreviewable pile of junk. It
> presents code witout any coherent problem description and analysis.
> And
> the patches are not split sanely either.

There is a more complete and slightly outdated description in the
previous version of the patch at
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/07c25c246c55012981ec0296eee23e68c719333a.camel@marvell.com/
.

It allows userspace application to take a CPU core for itself and run
completely isolated, with no disturbances. There is work in progress
that also disables and re-enables TLB flushes, and depending on CPU it
may be possible to also pre-allocate cache, so it would not be affected
by the rest of the system. Events that cause interaction with isolated
task, cause isolation breaking, turning the task into a regular
userspace task that can continue running normally and enter isolated
state again if necessary.

To make this feature suitable for any practical use, many mechanisms
that normally would cause events on a CPU, should exclude CPU cores in
this state, and synchronization should happen later, at the time of
isolation breaking.

There are three architectures supported, x86, arm and arm64, and it
should be possible to extend it to others. Unfortunately kernel entry
procedures are neither unified, nor straightforward, so introducing new
feature to them causes an appearance of a mess.

--
Alex