Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] drm/ttm: Fix vm page protection handling

From: Thomas HellstrÃm (VMware)
Date: Wed Dec 04 2019 - 09:16:20 EST


On 12/4/19 2:52 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Tue 03-12-19 11:48:53, Thomas HellstrÃm (VMware) wrote:
From: Thomas Hellstrom <thellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx>

TTM graphics buffer objects may, transparently to user-space, move
between IO and system memory. When that happens, all PTEs pointing to the
old location are zapped before the move and then faulted in again if
needed. When that happens, the page protection caching mode- and
encryption bits may change and be different from those of
struct vm_area_struct::vm_page_prot.

We were using an ugly hack to set the page protection correctly.
Fix that and instead use vmf_insert_mixed_prot() and / or
vmf_insert_pfn_prot().
Also get the default page protection from
struct vm_area_struct::vm_page_prot rather than using vm_get_page_prot().
This way we catch modifications done by the vm system for drivers that
want write-notification.
So essentially this should have any new side effect on functionality it
is just making a hacky/ugly code less so?

Functionality is unchanged. The use of a on-stack vma copy was severely frowned upon in an earlier thread, which also points to another similar example using vmf_insert_pfn_prot().

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190905103541.4161-2-thomas_os@xxxxxxxxxxxx/

In other words what are the
consequences of having page protection inconsistent from vma's?

During the years, it looks like the caching- and encryption flags of vma::vm_page_prot have been largely removed from usage. From what I can tell, there are no more places left that can affect TTM. We discussed __split_huge_pmd_locked() towards the end of that thread, but that doesn't affect TTM even with huge page-table entries.

/Thomas