Re: [PATCH] mm/thp: Correctly differentiate between mapped THP and PMD migration entry

From: Will Deacon
Date: Mon Nov 05 2018 - 19:35:18 EST


On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 11:45:00AM +0530, Anshuman Khandual wrote:
> On 10/17/2018 07:39 AM, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> > What we need to do during split is an invalidate of the huge TLB.
> > There's no pmd_trans_splitting anymore, so we only clear the present
> > bit in the PTE despite pmd_present still returns true (just like
> > PROT_NONE, nothing new in this respect). pmd_present never meant the
>
> On arm64, the problem is that pmd_present() is tied with pte_present() which
> checks for PTE_VALID (also PTE_PROT_NONE) but which gets cleared during PTE
> invalidation. pmd_present() returns false just after the first step of PMD
> splitting. So pmd_present() needs to be decoupled from PTE_VALID which is
> same as PMD_SECT_VALID and instead should depend upon a pte bit which sticks
> around like PAGE_PSE as in case of x86. I am working towards a solution.

Could we not just go via a PROT_NONE mapping during the split, instead of
having to allocate a new software bit to treat these invalid ptes as
present?

Will