Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:55:56 -0800 (PST)
From: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
To: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@qumranet.com>
cc: Robin Holt <holt@sgi.com>, Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com>,
       Izik Eidus <izike@qumranet.com>, Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>,
       kvm-devel@lists.sourceforge.net,
       Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>,
       Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>, steiner@sgi.com,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org,
       daniel.blueman@quadrics.com, Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Subject: Re: [patch 2/6] mmu_notifier: Callbacks to invalidate address ranges
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On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> But now I think there may be an issue with a third thread that may
> show unsafe the removal of invalidate_page from ptep_clear_flush.
> 
> A third thread writing to a page through the linux-pte and the guest
> VM writing to the same page through the sptes, will be writing on the
> same physical page concurrently and using an userspace spinlock w/o
> ever entering the kernel. With your patch that invalidate_range after
> dropping the PT lock, the third thread may start writing on the new
> page, when the guest is still writing to the old page through the
> sptes. While this couldn't happen with my patch.

A user space spinlock plays into this??? That is irrelevant to the kernel. 
And we are discussing "your" placement of the invalidate_range not mine.

This is the scenario that I described before. You just need two threads.
One thread is in do_wp_page and the other is writing through the spte. 
We are in do_wp_page. Meaning the page is not writable. The writer will 
have to take fault which will properly serialize access. It a bug if the 
spte would allow write.

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