Re: Use higher-order pages in vmalloc

From: Andy Lutomirski
Date: Thu Feb 22 2018 - 14:27:43 EST


On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 7:19 PM, Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 02/22/2018 11:01 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> On x86, if you shoot down the PTE for the current stack, you're dead.
>
> *If* we were to go do this insanity for vmalloc()'d memory, we could
> probably limit it to kswapd, and also make sure that kernel threads
> don't get vmalloc()'d stacks or that we mark them in a way to say we
> never muck with them.

How does that help? We need to make sure that the task whose stack
we're migrating is (a) not running and (b) is not being switched in or
out. And we have to make sure that there isn't some *other* mm that
has the task's stack in ASID's TLB space.

Maybe we take some lock so the task can't run, then flush the world,
then release the lock.