Re: [PATCH 21/23] x86, pcid, kaiser: allow flushing for future ASID switches

From: Andy Lutomirski
Date: Wed Nov 01 2017 - 16:31:59 EST


On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 7:17 AM, Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 11/01/2017 01:03 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>> This ensures that any futuee context switches will do a full flush
>>> of the TLB so they pick up the changes.
>> I'm convuced. What was wrong with the old code? I guess I just don't
>> see what the problem is that is solved by this patch.
>
> Instead of flushing *now* with INVPCID, this lets us flush *later* with
> CR3. It just hijacks the code that you already have that flushes CR3
> when loading a new ASID by making all ASIDs look new in the future.
>
> We have to load CR3 anyway, so we might as well just do this flush then.

Would it make more sense to put it in flush_tlb_func_common() instead?

Also, I don't understand what clear_non_loaded_ctxs() is trying to do.
It looks like it's invalidating all the other logical address spaces.
And I don't see why you want a all_other_ctxs_invalid variable. Isn't
the goal to mark a single ASID as needing a *user* flush the next time
we switch to user mode using that ASID? Your code seems like it's
going to flush a lot of *kernel* PCIDs.

Can you explain the overall logic?