Re: [PATCH 39/41] kernel/fork: throttle call_rcu() calls in vm_area_free
From: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Date: 2023-01-23 19:31:48
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On Mon, Jan 23, 2023 at 08:18:37PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Mon 23-01-23 18:23:08, Matthew Wilcox wrote:quoted
On Mon, Jan 23, 2023 at 09:46:20AM -0800, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:[...]quoted
quoted
Yes, batching the vmas into a list and draining it in remove_mt() and exit_mmap() as you suggested makes sense to me and is quite simple. Let's do that if nobody has objections.I object. We *know* nobody has a reference to any of the VMAs because you have to have a refcount on the mm before you can get a reference to a VMA. If Michal is saying that somebody could do: mmget(mm); vma = find_vma(mm); lock_vma(vma); mmput(mm); vma->a = b; unlock_vma(mm, vma); then that's something we'd catch in review -- you obviously can't use the mm after you've dropped your reference to it.I am not claiming this is possible now. I do not think we want to have something like that in the future either but that is really hard to envision. I am claiming that it is subtle and potentially error prone to have two different ways of mass vma freeing wrt. locking. Also, don't we have a very similar situation during last munmaps?
We shouldn't have two ways of mass VMA freeing. Nobody's suggesting that. There are two cases; there's munmap(), which typically frees a single VMA (yes, theoretically, you can free hundreds of VMAs with a single call which spans multiple VMAs, but in practice that doesn't happen), and there's exit_mmap() which happens on exec() and exit(). For the munmap() case, just RCU-free each one individually. For the exit_mmap() case, there's no need to use RCU because nobody should still have a VMA pointer after calling mmdrop() [1] [1] Sorry, the above example should have been mmgrab()/mmdrop(), not mmget()/mmput(); you're not allowed to look at the VMA list with an mmget(), you need to have grabbed.