Re: [PATCH 2/3] x86,mm: drop TLB flush from ptep_set_access_flags

From: Borislav Petkov
Date: Sat Nov 17 2012 - 10:17:05 EST


On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 06:56:10AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I wonder how we could actually test for it. We'd have to have some
> per-cpu page-fault address check (along with a generation count on the
> mm or similar). I doubt we'd figure out anything that works reliably
> and efficiently and would actually show any problems (plus we would
> have no way to ever know we even got the code right, since presumably
> we'd never find hardware that actually shows the behavior we'd be
> looking for..)

Hmm, touching some wrong page through the stale TLB entry could be a
pretty nasty issue to debug. But you're probably right: how does one
test cheaply whether a PTE just got kicked out of the TLB? Maybe mark it
not-present but this would force a rewalk in the case when it is shared,
which is penalty we don't want to pay.

Oh well...

--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.
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