Excerpts from Andy Lutomirski's message of December 5, 2020 12:37 am:

quoted

On Dec 3, 2020, at 11:54 PM, Nicholas Piggin [off-list ref] wrote:

Excerpts from Andy Lutomirski's message of December 4, 2020 3:26 pm:

quoted

This is a mockup.  It's designed to illustrate the algorithm and how the
code might be structured.  There are several things blatantly wrong with
it:

The coding stype is not up to kernel standards.  I have prototypes in the
wrong places and other hacks.

There's a problem with mm_cpumask() not being reliable.

Interesting, this might be a way to reduce those IPIs with fairly 
minimal fast path cost. Would be interesting to see how much performance 
advantage it has over my dumb simple shoot-lazies.

My real motivation isn’t really performance per se. I think there’s considerable value in keeping the core algorithms the same across all architectures, and I think my approach can manage that with only a single hint from the architecture as to which CPUs to scan.

With shoot-lazies, in contrast, enabling it everywhere would either malfunction or have very poor performance or even DoS issues on arches like arm64 and s390x that don’t track mm_cpumask at all.  I’m sure we could come up with some way to mitigate that, but I think that my approach may be better overall for keeping the core code uniform and relatively straightforward.

I'd go the other way. The mm_cpumark, TLB, and lazy maintainence is 
different between architectures anyway. I'd keep the simple refcount,
and the pretty simple shoot-lazies approaches for now at least until
a bit more is done on other fronts. If x86 is shooting down lazies on 
the final TLB flush as well, then I might be inclined to think that's
the better way to go in the long term. Shoot-lazies would be a bit of
a bolted on hack for powerpc/hash but it has ~zero impact to core code
really.

Thanks,
Nick