[adding Steve, since he worked on THP for 32-bit ARM]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 07:19:07PM +0100, Gerald Schaefer wrote:

On Tue, 23 Feb 2016 13:32:21 +0300
"Kirill A. Shutemov" [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

The theory is that the splitting bit effetely masked bogus pmd_present():
we had pmd_trans_splitting() in all code path and that prevented mm from
touching the pmd. Once pmd_trans_splitting() has gone, mm proceed with the
pmd where it shouldn't and here's a boom.

Well, I don't think pmd_present() == true is bogus for a trans_huge pmd under
splitting, after all there is a page behind the the pmd. Also, if it was
bogus, and it would need to be false, why should it be marked !pmd_present()
only at the pmdp_invalidate() step before the pmd_populate()? It clearly
is pmd_present() before that, on all architectures, and if there was any
problem/race with that, setting it to !pmd_present() at this stage would
only (marginally) reduce the race window.

BTW, PowerPC and Sparc seem to do the same thing in pmdp_invalidate(),
i.e. they do not set pmd_present() == false, only mark it so that it would
not generate a new TLB entry, just like on s390. After all, the function
is called pmdp_invalidate(), and I think the comment in mm/huge_memory.c
before that call is just a little ambiguous in its wording. When it says
"mark the pmd notpresent" it probably means "mark it so that it will not
generate a new TLB entry", which is also what the comment is really about:
prevent huge and small entries in the TLB for the same page at the same
time.

FWIW, and since the ARM arch-list is already on cc, I think there is
an issue with pmdp_invalidate() on ARM, since it also seems to clear
the trans_huge (and formerly trans_splitting) bit, which actually makes
the pmd !pmd_present(), but it violates the other requirement from the
comment:
"the pmd_trans_huge and pmd_trans_splitting must remain set at all times
on the pmd until the split is complete for this pmd"

I've only been testing this for arm64 (where I'm yet to see a problem),
but we use the generic pmdp_invalidate implementation from
mm/pgtable-generic.c there. On arm64, pmd_trans_huge will return true
after pmd_mknotpresent. On arm, it does look to be buggy, since it nukes
the entire entry... Steve?

Will