Re: [PATCH v12 01/31] mm: introduce CONFIG_SPECULATIVE_PAGE_FAULT

From: Laurent Dufour
Date: Tue Apr 23 2019 - 11:22:06 EST


Le 18/04/2019 Ã 23:47, Jerome Glisse a ÃcritÂ:
On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 03:44:52PM +0200, Laurent Dufour wrote:
This configuration variable will be used to build the code needed to
handle speculative page fault.

By default it is turned off, and activated depending on architecture
support, ARCH_HAS_PTE_SPECIAL, SMP and MMU.

The architecture support is needed since the speculative page fault handler
is called from the architecture's page faulting code, and some code has to
be added there to handle the speculative handler.

The dependency on ARCH_HAS_PTE_SPECIAL is required because vm_normal_page()
does processing that is not compatible with the speculative handling in the
case ARCH_HAS_PTE_SPECIAL is not set.

Suggested-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Suggested-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Laurent Dufour <ldufour@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Reviewed-by: JÃrÃme Glisse <jglisse@xxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks JÃrÃme.

Small question below

---
mm/Kconfig | 22 ++++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 22 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/Kconfig b/mm/Kconfig
index 0eada3f818fa..ff278ac9978a 100644
--- a/mm/Kconfig
+++ b/mm/Kconfig
@@ -761,4 +761,26 @@ config GUP_BENCHMARK
config ARCH_HAS_PTE_SPECIAL
bool
+config ARCH_SUPPORTS_SPECULATIVE_PAGE_FAULT
+ def_bool n
+
+config SPECULATIVE_PAGE_FAULT
+ bool "Speculative page faults"
+ default y
+ depends on ARCH_SUPPORTS_SPECULATIVE_PAGE_FAULT
+ depends on ARCH_HAS_PTE_SPECIAL && MMU && SMP
+ help
+ Try to handle user space page faults without holding the mmap_sem.
+
+ This should allow better concurrency for massively threaded processes

Is there any case where it does not provide better concurrency ? The
should make me wonder :)

Depending on the VMA's type, it may not provide better concurrency. Indeed only anonymous mapping are managed currently. Perhaps this should be mentioned here, is it ?

+ since the page fault handler will not wait for other thread's memory
+ layout change to be done, assuming that this change is done in
+ another part of the process's memory space. This type of page fault
+ is named speculative page fault.
+
+ If the speculative page fault fails because a concurrent modification
+ is detected or because underlying PMD or PTE tables are not yet
+ allocated, the speculative page fault fails and a classic page fault
+ is then tried.
+
endmenu
--
2.21.0