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Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 1/8] mm: mmap: unmap large mapping by section
To:     Laurent Dufour <ldufour@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>, akpm@linux-foundation.org,
        linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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From:   Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com>
Message-ID: <d2fecab7-6e34-551f-7033-2a5df0dc5e5b@linux.alibaba.com>
Date:   Thu, 22 Mar 2018 09:46:38 -0700
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On 3/22/18 9:18 AM, Laurent Dufour wrote:
>
> On 22/03/2018 17:05, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 04:54:52PM +0100, Laurent Dufour wrote:
>>> On 22/03/2018 16:40, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 04:32:00PM +0100, Laurent Dufour wrote:
>>>>> Regarding the page fault, why not relying on the PTE locking ?
>>>>>
>>>>> When munmap() will unset the PTE it will have to held the PTE lock, so this
>>>>> will serialize the access.
>>>>> If the page fault occurs before the mmap(MAP_FIXED), the page mapped will be
>>>>> removed when mmap(MAP_FIXED) would do the cleanup. Fair enough.
>>>> The page fault handler will walk the VMA tree to find the correct
>>>> VMA and then find that the VMA is marked as deleted.  If it assumes
>>>> that the VMA has been deleted because of munmap(), then it can raise
>>>> SIGSEGV immediately.  But if the VMA is marked as deleted because of
>>>> mmap(MAP_FIXED), it must wait until the new VMA is in place.
>>> I'm wondering if such a complexity is required.
>>> If the user space process try to access the page being overwritten through
>>> mmap(MAP_FIXED) by another thread, there is no guarantee that it will
>>> manipulate the *old* page or *new* one.
>> Right; but it must return one or the other, it can't segfault.
> Good point, I missed that...
>
>>> I'd think this is up to the user process to handle that concurrency.
>>> What needs to be guaranteed is that once mmap(MAP_FIXED) returns the old page
>>> are no more there, which is done through the mmap_sem and PTE locking.
>> Yes, and allowing the fault handler to return the *old* page risks the
>> old page being reinserted into the page tables after the unmapping task
>> has done its work.
> The PTE locking should prevent that.
>
>> It's *really* rare to page-fault on a VMA which is in the middle of
>> being replaced.  Why are you trying to optimise it?
> I was not trying to optimize it, but to not wait in the page fault handler.
> This could become tricky in the case the VMA is removed once mmap(MAP_FIXED) is
> done and before the waiting page fault got woken up. This means that the
> removed VMA structure will have to remain until all the waiters are woken up
> which implies ref_count or similar.

We may not need ref_count. After removing "locked-for-deletion" vmas 
when mmap(MAP_FIXED) is done, just wake up page fault to re-lookup vma, 
then it will find the new vma installed by mmap(MAP_FIXED), right?

I'm not sure if completion can do this or not since I'm not quite 
familiar with it :-(

Yang

>
>>>> I think I was wrong to describe VMAs as being *deleted*.  I think we
>>>> instead need the concept of a *locked* VMA that page faults will block on.
>>>> Conceptually, it's a per-VMA rwsem, but I'd use a completion instead of
>>>> an rwsem since the only reason to write-lock the VMA is because it is
>>>> being deleted.
>>> Such a lock would only makes sense in the case of mmap(MAP_FIXED) since when
>>> the VMA is removed there is no need to wait. Isn't it ?
>> I can't think of another reason.  I suppose we could mark the VMA as
>> locked-for-deletion or locked-for-replacement and have the SIGSEGV happen
>> early.  But I'm not sure that optimising for SIGSEGVs is a worthwhile
>> use of our time.  Just always have the pagefault sleep for a deleted VMA.