Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1761878AbYBEW1V (ORCPT ); Tue, 5 Feb 2008 17:27:21 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1759886AbYBEW1B (ORCPT ); Tue, 5 Feb 2008 17:27:01 -0500 Received: from host36-195-149-62.serverdedicati.aruba.it ([62.149.195.36]:57079 "EHLO mx.cpushare.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756579AbYBEW1A (ORCPT ); Tue, 5 Feb 2008 17:27:00 -0500 Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2008 23:26:58 +0100 From: Andrea Arcangeli To: Christoph Lameter Cc: Robin Holt , Avi Kivity , Izik Eidus , kvm-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, Peter Zijlstra , steiner@sgi.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, daniel.blueman@quadrics.com Subject: Re: [PATCH] mmu notifiers #v5 Message-ID: <20080205222657.GG7441@v2.random> References: <20080201120955.GX7185@v2.random> <20080203021704.GC7185@v2.random> <20080205052525.GD7441@v2.random> <20080205180802.GE7441@v2.random> <20080205205519.GF7441@v2.random> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2155 Lines: 45 On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 02:06:23PM -0800, Christoph Lameter wrote: > On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > > > On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 10:17:41AM -0800, Christoph Lameter wrote: > > > The other approach will not have any remote ptes at that point. Why would > > > there be a coherency issue? > > > > It never happens that two threads writes to two different physical > > pages by working on the same process virtual address. This is an issue > > only for KVM which is probably ok with it but certainly you can't > > consider the dependency on the page-pin less fragile or less complex > > than my PT lock approach. > > You can avoid the page-pin and the pt lock completely by zapping the > mappings at _start and then holding off new references until _end. Avoid the PT lock? The PT lock has to be taken anyway by the linux VM. "holding off new references until _end" = per-range mutex less scalar and more expensive than the PT lock that has to be taken anyway. > As I said the implementation is up to the caller. Not sure what > XPmem is using there but then XPmem is not using follow_page. The GRU > would be using a lightway way of locking not rbtrees. "lightway way of locking" = mm-wide-mutex (not necessary at all if we take advantage of the per-pte-scalar PT lock that has to be taken anyway like in my patch) > Maybe that is true for KVM but certainly not true for the GRU. The GRU is > designed to manage several petabytes of memory that may be mapped by a > series of Linux instances. If a process only maps a small chunk of 4 > Gigabytes then we already have to deal with 1 mio callbacks. KVM is also going to map a lot of stuff, but mapping involves mmap, munmap/mremap/mprotect not. The size of mmap is irrelevant in both approaches. optimizing do_exit by making the tlb-miss runtime slower doesn't sound great to me and that's your patch does if you force GRU to use it. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/