Re: [PATCH 16/18] KVM: Don't take mmu_lock for range invalidation unless necessary

On Wed, Mar 31, 2021, Sean Christopherson wrote:

On Wed, Mar 31, 2021, Paolo Bonzini wrote:

quoted

On 31/03/21 21:47, Sean Christopherson wrote:
I also thought of busy waiting on down_read_trylock if the MMU notifier
cannot block, but that would also be invalid for the opposite reason (the
down_write task might be asleep, waiting for other readers to release the
task, and the down_read_trylock busy loop might not let that task run).

quoted

And that's _already_ the worst case since notifications are currently
serialized by mmu_lock.

But right now notifications are not a single critical section, they're two,
aren't they?

Ah, crud, yes.  Holding a spinlock across the entire start() ... end() would be
bad, especially when the notifier can block since that opens up the possibility
of the task sleeping/blocking/yielding while the spinlock is held.  Bummer.

On a related topic, any preference on whether to have an explicit "must_lock"
flag (what I posted), or derive the logic based on other params?

The helper I posted does:

	if (range->must_lock &&
	    kvm_mmu_lock_and_check_handler(kvm, range, &locked))
		goto out_unlock;

but it could be:

	if (!IS_KVM_NULL_FN(range->on_lock) && !range->may_block &&
	    kvm_mmu_lock_and_check_handler(kvm, range, &locked))
		goto out_unlock;

The generated code should be nearly identical on a modern compiler, so it's
purely a question of aesthetics.  I slightly prefer the explicit "must_lock" to
avoid spreading out the logic too much, but it also feels a bit superfluous.