Re: [PATCH RFC v2 00/12] mm/hugetlb: Make huge_pte_offset() thread-safe for pmd unshare

David Hildenbrand
2022-11-23T19:32:24Z

On 23.11.22 19:56, Peter Xu wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 10:21:30AM -0800, Mike Kravetz wrote:
>> On 11/23/22 10:09, Peter Xu wrote:
>>> On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 10:40:40AM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>>> Let me try understand the basic problem first:
>>>>
>>>> hugetlb walks page tables semi-lockless: while we hold the mmap lock, we
>>>> don't grab the page table locks. That's very hugetlb specific handling and I
>>>> assume hugetlb uses different mechanisms to sync against MADV_DONTNEED,
>>>> concurrent page fault s... but that's no news. hugetlb is weird in many ways
>>>> :)
>>>>
>>>> So, IIUC, you want a mechanism to synchronize against PMD unsharing. Can't
>>>> we use some very basic locking for that?
>>>
>>> Yes we can in most cases. Please refer to above paragraph [1] where I
>>> referred Mike's recent work on vma lock. That's the basic locking we need
>>> so far to protect pmd unsharing. I'll attach the link too in the next
>>> post, which is here:
>>>
>>> https://lore.kernel.org/r/20220914221810.95771-1-mike.kravetz@oracle.com
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Using RCU / disabling local irqs seems a bit excessive because we *are*
>>>> holding the mmap lock and only care about concurrent unsharing
>>>
>>> The series wanted to address where the vma lock is not easy to take. It
>>> originates from when I was reading Mike's other patch, I forgot why I did
>>> that but I just noticed there's some code path that we may not want to take
>>> a sleepable lock, e.g. in follow page code.
>>
>> Yes, it was the patch suggested by David,
>>
>> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20221030225825.40872-1-mike.kravetz@oracle.com/
>>
>> The issue was that FOLL_NOWAIT could be passed into follow_page_mask. If so,
>> then we do not want potentially sleep on the mutex.
>>
>> Since you both are on this thread, I thought of/noticed a related issue. In
>> follow_hugetlb_page, it looks like we can call hugetlb_fault if FOLL_NOWAIT
>> is set. hugetlb_fault certainly has the potential for sleeping. Is this also
>> a similar issue?
>
> Yeah maybe the clean way to do this is when FAULT_FLAG_RETRY_NOWAIT is set
> we should always try to not sleep at all.

hva_to_pfn_slow() that sets FOLL_NOWAIT calls get_user_pages_unlocked(),
which will just do a straight mmap_read_lock().

The interpretation of FOLL_NOWAIT should not be "don't take any
sleepable locks" but instead more like "don't wait for a page to get
swapped in".

#define FOLL_NOWAIT 0x20 /* if a disk transfer is needed, start the IO

I did not read the full replies yet (sorry, busy hacking :) ) but *any*
code path that already takes the mmap_read_lock() can just take whatever
other lock we want -- IMHO. No need to over-complicate our code trying
to avoid locks in that case.

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb