Re: [PATCH]: Handling spurious page fault for hugetlb region for 2.6.14-rc4-git5

[Rohit Seth <rohit.seth@intel.com>]

On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 14:34 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> "Seth, Rohit" <rohit.seth@intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > Linus,
> > 
> > [PATCH]: Handle spurious page fault for hugetlb region
> > 
> > The hugetlb pages are currently pre-faulted.  At the time of mmap of
> > hugepages, we populate the new PTEs.  It is possible that HW has already cached
> > some of the unused PTEs internally.
> 
> What's an "unused pte"?  One which maps a regular-sized page at the same
> virtual address?  How can such a thing come about, and why isn't it already
> a problem for regular-sized pages?  From where does the hardware prefetch
> the pte contents?
> 

Unsused pte is where *pte == 0.  Basically entries in leaf page table
that does not map anything.  If such a pte ends up mapping a normal page
then  you get a page fault and HW/handler does the right thing (in terms
of purging old entries). 


> IOW: please tell us more about this hardware pte-fetcher.
> 
> >  These stale entries never get a chance to
> > be purged in existing control flow.
> 
> I'd have thought that invalidating those ptes at mmap()-time would be a
> more consistent approach.

That would be adding too many unconditional purges (which are very
expensive operations) during mmap.  And as we are only talking of
speculative pre-fetches that are done by HW so IMO we should do this as
lazily as possible (only if required).

> 
> > This patch extends the check in page fault code for hugepages.  Check if
> > a faulted address falls with in size for the hugetlb file backing it.  We
> > return VM_FAULT_MINOR for these cases (assuming that the arch specific
> > page-faulting code purges the stale entry for the archs that need it).
> 
> Do you have an example of the code which does this purging?
> 

Tha page_not_present vector in IA-64 for example.

> > --- linux-2.6.14-rc4-git5-x86/include/linux/hugetlb.h	2005-10-18 13:14:24.879947360 -0700
> > +++ b/include/linux/hugetlb.h	2005-10-18 13:13:55.711381656 -0700
> > @@ -155,11 +155,24 @@
> >  {
> >  	file->f_op = &hugetlbfs_file_operations;
> >  }
> > +
> > +static inline int valid_hugetlb_file_off(struct vm_area_struct *vma, 
> > +					  unsigned long address) 
> > +{
> > +	struct inode *inode = vma->vm_file->f_dentry->d_inode;
> > +	loff_t file_off = address - vma->vm_start;
> > +	
> > +	file_off += (vma->vm_pgoff << PAGE_SHIFT);
> > +	
> > +	return (file_off < inode->i_size);
> > +}
> 
> I suppose we should use i_size_read() here.

You are right.

> 
> > +		if (valid_hugetlb_file_off(vma, address))
> > +			/* We get here only if there was a stale(zero) TLB entry 
> > +			 * (because of  HW prefetching). 
> > +			 * Low-level arch code (if needed) should have already
> > +			 * purged the stale entry as part of this fault handling.  
> > +			 * Here we just return.
> > +			 */
> 
> If the low-level code has purged the stale pte then it knows what's
> happening.  Perhaps it shouldn't call into handle_mm_fault() at all?

Well, at that time the code does not know if the address belong to
hugetlbfile.  The archs that needs those purges in low level code need
them for all (for example) page not present faults.


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