Re: [RFC PATCH 09/37] mm: add per-mm mmap sequence counter for speculative page fault handling.

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2021 at 06:44:34PM -0700, Michel Lespinasse wrote:
> The counter's write side is hooked into the existing mmap locking API:
> mmap_write_lock() increments the counter to the next (odd) value, and
> mmap_write_unlock() increments it again to the next (even) value.
> 
> The counter's speculative read side is supposed to be used as follows:
> 
> seq = mmap_seq_read_start(mm);
> if (seq & 1)
> 	goto fail;
> .... speculative handling here ....
> if (!mmap_seq_read_check(mm, seq)
> 	goto fail;
> 
> This API guarantees that, if none of the "fail" tests abort
> speculative execution, the speculative code section did not run
> concurrently with any mmap writer.

So this is obviously safe, but it's also super excessive. Any change,
anywhere, will invalidate and abort a SPF.

Since you make a complete copy of the vma, you could memcmp it in its
entirety instead of this.