Re: [RFC][PATCH 1/5] mm: Rework {set,clear,mm}_tlb_flush_pending()

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt
Date: Wed Aug 02 2017 - 22:35:40 EST


On Wed, 2017-08-02 at 10:02 +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
> > > So flush_tlb_range is actually weaker than smp_mb in some respects, yet the
> > > flush_tlb_pending stuff will still work correctly.
> >
> > So while I think you're right, and we could live with this, after all,
> > if we know the mm is CPU local, there shouldn't be any SMP concerns wrt
> > its page tables. Do you really want to make this more complicated?
>
> It gives us a nice performance lift on arm64 and I have a patch...[1]

We do that on powerpc too, though there are ongoing questions a to
whether an smp_mb() after setting the mask bit in switch_mm is
sufficient vs. prefetch brining entries in the TLB after the context is
switched. But that's a powerpc specific issue. Nick Piggin is working
on sorting that out.

Cheers,
Ben.