Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2016 11:20:36 +0000
From: Matt Fleming <matt@codeblueprint.co.uk>
To: Sylvain Chouleur <sylvain.chouleur@gmail.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>, Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>,
        Sai Praneeth Prakhya <sai.praneeth.prakhya@intel.com>,
        "Ravi V. Shankar" <ravi.v.shankar@intel.com>,
        Toshi Kani <toshi.kani@hp.com>, Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
        Luis Rodriguez <mcgrof@suse.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com>, "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>,
        "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>, ricardo.neri@intel.com,
        Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>,
        Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org>
Subject: Re: [tip:efi/core] x86/mm/pat: Use _PAGE_GLOBAL bit for EFI page
 table mappings
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On Mon, 29 Feb, at 11:56:56AM, Sylvain Chouleur wrote:
> 2016-02-24 20:45 GMT+01:00 Matt Fleming <matt@codeblueprint.co.uk>:
> > On Wed, 24 Feb, at 10:56:13AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >> On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 8:36 AM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >> So the EFI runtime crap should not change once it is mapped. And those
> >> >> should be global. It is only natural.
> >> >
> >> > Why is it natural?
> >> >
> >> > Long-term, I'd rather see EFI runtime services use an actual mm_struct
> >> > and use_mm.
> >>
> >> Definitely.
> >>
> >> The EFI runtime page mapping may be unchanging, but that doesn't mean
> >> we should be mapping it all the time - the mapping may not change, but
> >> we will change away from it.
> >
> > There is movement towards hanging the EFI memory map off of mm_struct
> > for x86. ARM and arm64 already do this and there were some patches
> > from Sylvain (Cc'd) to do this for the purposes of having a task
> > context that could be preempted while in the middle of an EFI runtime
> > call for some Intel platforms,
> >
> >   https://lkml.kernel.org/r/1452702762-27216-4-git-send-email-sylvain.chouleur@gmail.com
> 
> I was thinking we could use the efi kthread to handle the efi services
> generically, not only for the interruptible case, and have a way to decide if we
> allow interruptions inside the efi call itself or not.
> 
> Then all runtime services would use an mm_struct. The drawback is that you will
> need two context switchs to be able to execute the runtime service.

I would be surprised if the asynchronous nature of having a special
EFI kthread would buy you any benefit in general. And in fact, in the
efi-pstore code you can be invoked in IRQ context and you really don't
want to start talking to a kthread.