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Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 1/8] mm: mmap: unmap large mapping by section
To:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        Laurent Dufour <ldufour@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
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: <9adccd2e-9c1c-8da1-6098-9ebfdd9d3fc9@linux.alibaba.com>
Date:   Thu, 22 Mar 2018 09:49:01 -0700
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On 3/22/18 9:05 AM, 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.
>
>> 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.
>
> 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 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.

It sounds worth to me. If we have every page fault sleep to wait for vma 
deletion is done, it sounds equal to wait for mmap_sem all the time, right?

Yang