On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 03:55:37PM -0800, Christoph Lameter wrote: > On Thu, 31 Jan 2008, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > > > > I think Andrea's original concept of the lock in the mmu_notifier_head > > > structure was the best. I agree with him that it should be a spinlock > > > instead of the rw_lock. > > > > BTW, I don't see the scalability concern with huge number of tasks: > > the lock is still in the mm, down_write(mm->mmap_sem); oneinstruction; > > up_write(mm->mmap_sem) is always going to scale worse than > > spin_lock(mm->somethingelse); oneinstruction; > > spin_unlock(mm->somethinglese). > > If we put it elsewhere in the mm then we increase the size of the memory > used in the mm_struct.
Yes, and it will increase of the same amount of RAM that you pretend everyone to pay even if MMU_NOTIFIER=n after your patch is applied (vs mine that generated 0 ram utilization increase when MMU_NOTIFIER=n). And the additional ram will provide not just self-contained locking but higher scalability too. I think it's much more important to generate zero ram and CPU overhead for the embedded (this is something I was very careful to enforce in all my patches), than to reduce scalability and not having a self contained locking on full configurations with MMU_NOTIFIER=y. > Hmmmm.. exit_mmap is only called when the last reference is removed > against the mm right? So no tasks are running anymore. No pages are left. > Do we need to serialize at all for mmu_notifier_release? KVM sure doesn't need any locking there. I thought somebody had to possibly take a pin on the "mm_count" and pretend to call mmu_notifier_register at will until mmdrop was finally called, in a out of order fashion given mmu_notifier_release was implemented like if the list could change from under it. Note mmdrop != mmput. mmput and in turn mm_users is the serialization point if you prefer to drop all locking from _release. Nobody must ever attempt a mmu_notifier_* after calling mmput for that mm. That should be enough to be safe. I'm fine either ways... -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
