Re: [PATCH 0/5] make *_gate_vma accept mm_struct instead of task_struct

On Tue, Mar 08, 2011 at 07:31:56PM -0500, Stephen Wilson wrote:

Morally, the question of whether an address lies in a gate vma should be asked
with respect to an mm, not a particular task.

Practically, dropping the dependency on task_struct will help make current and
future operations on mm's more flexible and convenient.  In particular, it
allows some code paths to avoid the need to hold task_lock.

The only architecture this change impacts in any significant way is x86_64.
The principle change on that architecture is to mirror TIF_IA32 via
a new flag in mm_context_t. 

The problem is -- you're adding a likely cache miss on mm_struct for
every 32bit compat syscall now, even if they don't need mm_struct
currently (and a lot of them do not) Unless there's a very good
justification to make up for this performance issue elsewhere
(including numbers) this seems like a bad idea.

This is the first of a two part series that implements safe writes to
/proc/pid/mem.  I will be posting the second series to lkml shortly.  These

Making every syscall slower for /proc/pid/mem doesn't seem like a good
tradeoff to me. Please solve this in some other way.

-Andi