Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] powerpc/booke64: add sync after writing PTE

On Mon, 2013-09-16 at 19:06 -0500, Scott Wood wrote:

On Mon, 2013-09-16 at 07:38 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

quoted

On Fri, 2013-09-13 at 22:50 -0500, Scott Wood wrote:

quoted

The ISA says that a sync is needed to order a PTE write with a
subsequent hardware tablewalk lookup.  On e6500, without this sync
we've been observed to die with a DSI due to a PTE write not being seen
by a subsequent access, even when everything happens on the same
CPU.

This is gross, I didn't realize we had that bogosity in the
architecture...

Did you measure the performance impact ?

I didn't see a noticeable impact on the tests I ran, but those were
aimed at measuring TLB miss overhead.  I'll need to try it with a
benchmark that's more oriented around lots of page table updates.

Lmbench's fork test runs about 2% slower with the sync.  I've been told
that nothing relevant has changed since we saw the failure during
emulation; it's probably luck and/or timing, or maybe a sync got added
somewhere else since then?  I think it's only really a problem for
kernel page tables, since user page tables will retry if do_page_fault()
sees a valid PTE.  So maybe we should put an mb() in map_kernel_page()
instead.

-Scott