Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753327AbbEHWVw (ORCPT ); Fri, 8 May 2015 18:21:52 -0400 Received: from mail.linuxfoundation.org ([140.211.169.12]:34497 "EHLO mail.linuxfoundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751536AbbEHWVv (ORCPT ); Fri, 8 May 2015 18:21:51 -0400 Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 15:21:49 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: "Aneesh Kumar K.V" Cc: mpe@ellerman.id.au, paulus@samba.org, benh@kernel.crashing.org, kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com, aarcange@redhat.com, linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org Subject: Re: [PATCH V2 2/2] powerpc/thp: Serialize pmd clear against a linux page table walk. Message-Id: <20150508152149.7fd52bb4b7c2a0911c33be00@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <1430983408-24924-2-git-send-email-aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> References: <1430983408-24924-1-git-send-email-aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <1430983408-24924-2-git-send-email-aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> X-Mailer: Sylpheed 3.4.1 (GTK+ 2.24.23; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 993 Lines: 19 On Thu, 7 May 2015 12:53:28 +0530 "Aneesh Kumar K.V" wrote: > Serialize against find_linux_pte_or_hugepte which does lock-less > lookup in page tables with local interrupts disabled. For huge pages > it casts pmd_t to pte_t. Since format of pte_t is different from > pmd_t we want to prevent transit from pmd pointing to page table > to pmd pointing to huge page (and back) while interrupts are disabled. > We clear pmd to possibly replace it with page table pointer in > different code paths. So make sure we wait for the parallel > find_linux_pte_or_hugepage to finish. I'm not seeing here any description of the problem which is being fixed. Does the patch make the machine faster? Does the machine crash? -- 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/