Subject: faults and signals
From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
To: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>, Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>,
       Linux Memory Management <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, Jes Sorensen <jes@sgi.com>,
       Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
In-Reply-To: <452AEC8B.2070008@yahoo.com.au>
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Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 11:11:25 +1000
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OK, so we made some good progress... now remains my pet issue... faults
and signals :)

So in SPUfs, I have cases where apps trying to access user-space
registers of an SPE that is scheduled out might end up blocking a long
time in the page fault handler. I'm not 100% sure about DRM at this
point but I suppose they might have good use of a similar ability I'm
trying to provide which is for a page fault to be interruptible. That
would allow various cases of processes stuck in kernel for a logn time
(or forever if something goes wrong).

I think your new fault() thingy is the perfect way to get there. In the
normal page fault case, a signal is easy to handle: just refault
(NOPAGE_REFAULT without your patch or return NULL; with your patch,
though we might want to define a -EINTR result explicitely) and the
signals will be handled on the return to userland path. However, we
can't really handle them in get_user_pages() nor on kernel own faults
(__get_user etc...), at least not until we define versions of these that
can return -EINTR (we might want to do that for get_user_pages, but
let's assume not for now).

Thus what is needed is a way to inform the page fault handler wether it
can be interruptible or not. This could be done using the flags you have
in there, or some other bits in the argument structure.

That way, faults could basically check if coming from userland (testing
the ptregs) and set interruptible in that case (and possibly a flag to
get_user_pages() telling it can be interruptible for use by drivers who
can deal with it).

At the vm_ops level, existing things are fine, they are not
interruptible, and I can modify spufs to check that new flag and return
-EINTR on signals when waiting.

In fact, it might be that filemap and some filesystems might even want
to handle interruptible page faults :) but that's a different matter.

Ben.


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