Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 14:42:13 -0700
From: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>
To: Joerg Roedel <joro@8bytes.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>, Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>,
        Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>, Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>,
        Jerome Glisse <jglisse@redhat.com>, 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 <dwmw2@infradead.org>, 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()
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On Fri, 25 Jul 2014 23:38:06 +0200
Joerg Roedel <joro@8bytes.org> wrote:

> 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.

Making the _end callback just do another TLB flush is fine too, but it
would be nice to have the consistency of (1).  I can live with either
though, as long as the callbacks are well documented.

Thanks,
-- 
Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center
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