tree 1b8aa815ef85ed7034e6cb63c0837ff75db28fc5
parent baa2ef83981c71ceb00f68fbdac323253c2c3e42
author Steve Capper <steve.capper@linaro.org> 1412893754 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1412907960 -0400

mm: introduce a general RCU get_user_pages_fast()

This series implements general forms of get_user_pages_fast and
__get_user_pages_fast in core code and activates them for arm and arm64.

These are required for Transparent HugePages to function correctly, as a
futex on a THP tail will otherwise result in an infinite loop (due to the
core implementation of __get_user_pages_fast always returning 0).

Unfortunately, a futex on THP tail can be quite common for certain
workloads; thus THP is unreliable without a __get_user_pages_fast
implementation.

This series may also be beneficial for direct-IO heavy workloads and
certain KVM workloads.

This patch (of 6):

get_user_pages_fast() attempts to pin user pages by walking the page
tables directly and avoids taking locks.  Thus the walker needs to be
protected from page table pages being freed from under it, and needs to
block any THP splits.

One way to achieve this is to have the walker disable interrupts, and rely
on IPIs from the TLB flushing code blocking before the page table pages
are freed.

On some platforms we have hardware broadcast of TLB invalidations, thus
the TLB flushing code doesn't necessarily need to broadcast IPIs; and
spuriously broadcasting IPIs can hurt system performance if done too
often.

This problem has been solved on PowerPC and Sparc by batching up page
table pages belonging to more than one mm_user, then scheduling an
rcu_sched callback to free the pages.  This RCU page table free logic has
been promoted to core code and is activated when one enables
HAVE_RCU_TABLE_FREE.  Unfortunately, these architectures implement their
own get_user_pages_fast routines.

The RCU page table free logic coupled with an IPI broadcast on THP split
(which is a rare event), allows one to protect a page table walker by
merely disabling the interrupts during the walk.

This patch provides a general RCU implementation of get_user_pages_fast
that can be used by architectures that perform hardware broadcast of TLB
invalidations.

It is based heavily on the PowerPC implementation by Nick Piggin.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: various comment fixes]
Signed-off-by: Steve Capper <steve.capper@linaro.org>
Tested-by: Dann Frazier <dann.frazier@canonical.com>
Reviewed-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Cc: Christoffer Dall <christoffer.dall@linaro.org>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>