Re: [PATCH 1/2] hugetlbfs: support split page table lock

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Mon Jun 03 2013 - 09:19:41 EST


On Tue 28-05-13 15:52:50, Naoya Horiguchi wrote:
> Currently all of page table handling by hugetlbfs code are done under
> mm->page_table_lock. This is not optimal because there can be lock
> contentions between unrelated components using this lock.

While I agree with such a change in general I am a bit afraid of all
subtle tweaks in the mm code that make hugetlb special. Maybe there are
none for page_table_lock but I am not 100% sure. So this might be
really tricky and it is not necessary for your further patches, is it?

How have you tested this?

> This patch makes hugepage support split page table lock so that
> we use page->ptl of the leaf node of page table tree which is pte for
> normal pages but can be pmd and/or pud for hugepages of some architectures.
>
> Signed-off-by: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> arch/x86/mm/hugetlbpage.c | 6 ++--
> include/linux/hugetlb.h | 18 ++++++++++
> mm/hugetlb.c | 84 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------------

This doesn't seem to be the complete story. At least not from the
trivial:
$ find arch/ -name "*hugetlb*" | xargs git grep "page_table_lock" --
arch/powerpc/mm/hugetlbpage.c: spin_lock(&mm->page_table_lock);
arch/powerpc/mm/hugetlbpage.c: spin_unlock(&mm->page_table_lock);
arch/tile/mm/hugetlbpage.c: spin_lock(&mm->page_table_lock);
arch/tile/mm/hugetlbpage.c:
spin_unlock(&mm->page_table_lock);
arch/x86/mm/hugetlbpage.c: * called with vma->vm_mm->page_table_lock held.

--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
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