Re: [RFC v2 00/27] Kernel Address Space Isolation

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 02:47:23PM +0200, Alexandre Chartre wrote:
> On 7/12/19 2:36 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 02:17:20PM +0200, Alexandre Chartre wrote:
> > > On 7/12/19 1:44 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > 
> > > > AFAIK3 this wants/needs to be combined with core-scheduling to be
> > > > useful, but not a single mention of that is anywhere.
> > > 
> > > No. This is actually an alternative to core-scheduling. Eventually, ASI
> > > will kick all sibling hyperthreads when exiting isolation and it needs to
> > > run with the full kernel page-table (note that's currently not in these
> > > patches).
> > > 
> > > So ASI can be seen as an optimization to disabling hyperthreading: instead
> > > of just disabling hyperthreading you run with ASI, and when ASI can't preserve
> > > isolation you will basically run with a single thread.
> > 
> > You can't do that without much of the scheduler changes present in the
> > core-scheduling patches.
> > 
> 
> We hope we can do that without the whole core-scheduling mechanism. The idea
> is to send an IPI to all sibling hyperthreads. This IPI will interrupt these
> sibling hyperthreads and have them wait for a condition that will allow them
> to resume execution (for example when re-entering isolation). We are
> investigating this in parallel to ASI.

You cannot wait from IPI context, so you have to go somewhere else to
wait.

Also, consider what happens when the task that entered isolation decides
to schedule out / gets migrated.

I think you'll quickly find yourself back at core-scheduling.