Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1761033AbaGYViK (ORCPT ); Fri, 25 Jul 2014 17:38:10 -0400 Received: from 8bytes.org ([81.169.241.247]:34473 "EHLO theia.8bytes.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1760890AbaGYViJ (ORCPT ); Fri, 25 Jul 2014 17:38:09 -0400 Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 23:38:06 +0200 From: Joerg Roedel To: Jesse Barnes Cc: Andrew Morton , Andrea Arcangeli , Peter Zijlstra , Rik van Riel , Hugh Dickins , Mel Gorman , Johannes Weiner , Jerome Glisse , jroedel@suse.de, Jay.Cornwall@amd.com, Oded.Gabbay@amd.com, John.Bridgman@amd.com, Suravee.Suthikulpanit@amd.com, ben.sander@amd.com, David Woodhouse , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, iommu@lists.linux-foundation.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] mmu_notifier: Add mmu_notifier_invalidate_range() Message-ID: <20140725213806.GN14017@8bytes.org> References: <1406212541-25975-1-git-send-email-joro@8bytes.org> <1406212541-25975-2-git-send-email-joro@8bytes.org> <20140725131639.698f18ff@jbarnes-desktop> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20140725131639.698f18ff@jbarnes-desktop> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 01:16:39PM -0700, Jesse Barnes wrote: > > To allow managing external TLBs the MMU-notifiers need to > > catch the moment when pages are unmapped but not yet freed. > > This new notifier catches that moment and notifies the > > interested subsytem when pages that were unmapped are about > > to be freed. The new notifier will only be called between > > invalidate_range_start()/end(). > > So if we were actually sharing page tables, we should be able to make > start/end no-ops and just use this new callback, assuming we didn't > need to do any other serialization or debug stuff, right? Well, not completly. What you need with this patch-set is a invalidate_range and an invalidate_end call-back. There are call sites of the start/end functions where the TLB flush happens after the _end notifier (or at least can wait until _end is called). I did not add invalidate_range calls to these places (yet). But you can easily discard invalidate_range_start, any flush done in there is useless with shared page-tables. I though about removing the need for invalidate_range_end too when writing the patches, and possible solutions are 1) Add mmu_notifier_invalidate_range() to all places where start/end is called too. This might add some unnecessary overhead. 2) Call the invalidate_range() call-back from the mmu_notifier_invalidate_range_end too. 3) Just let the user register the same function for invalidate_range and invalidate_range_end I though that option 1) adds overhead that is not needed (but it might not be too bad, the overhead is an additional iteration over the mmu_notifer list when there are no call-backs registered). Option 2) might also be overhead if a user registers different functions for invalidate_range() and invalidate_range_end(). In the end I came to the conclusion that option 3) is the best one from an overhead POV. But probably targeting better usability with one of the other options is a better choice? I am open for thoughts and suggestions on that. Joerg -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/