Re: [PATCH v2 2/7] mm: introduce local state for lazy_mmu sections

David Hildenbrand
2025-09-12T14:25:16Z

On 12.09.25 16:05, Alexander Gordeev wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 12, 2025 at 03:02:15PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>> How would that work with nesting? I feel like there is a fundamental problem
>> with nesting with what you describe but I might be wrong.
>
> My picture is - flush on each lazy_mmu_disable(), pause on lazy_mmu_pause()
> and honour only top-level arch_enter_lazy_mmu_mode_pte(mm, start, end, ptep)
> context on all nested levels.
>
> In theory (and if I got it right, you leave the door open for this possibility)
> every (mm, start, end, ptep) context could be stored for each nesting level
> (as an opaque arch-specific data?).

Yes, I explained that we could do that, for example, by returning a
"struct arch_lazy_mmu_state" from enable() and feeding it into disable().

I would just wish that we could avoid that ...

As an alternative, you could store it somewhere else as an array (percpu
variable? task_struct) and support only a limited number of nesting
levels. The current nesting level could always be retrieved from the
task_struct, for example.

Maybe s390x really wouldn't need support for more than one nesting level
right now.

>
> But I do not really expect it ever, since arch_enter_lazy_mmu_mode_pte()
> is only to be called in PTE walkers that never span more than one page
> table and follow the pattern:

Well, the cover letter here states:

"Unfortunately, a corner case (DEBUG_PAGEALLOC) may still cause nesting
to occur on arm64. Ryan proposed [2] to address that corner case at the
generic level but this approach received pushback; [3] then attempted to
solve the issue on arm64 only, but it was deemed too fragile."

So I guess we should support nesting cleanly, at least on the core-mm side.

I guess we could start with saying "well, s390x doesn't fully support
nesting yet but doing so just requires changing the way we manage this
per-nesting-level state internally".

s390 is trying to do something different than the other archs here, so
that naturally concerns me :)

But if it's really just about forwarding that data and having s390 store
it somewhere (task_struct, percpu variable, etc), fine with me.

--
Cheers

David / dhildenb