Subject: Re: Freeing page tables through RCU

From: Gerald Schaefer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2021 17:12:46 +0100

On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 20:58:20 +0000
Matthew Wilcox <[email-masked]> wrote:

> In order to walk the page tables without the mmap semaphore, it must
> be possible to prevent them from being freed and reused (eg if munmap()
> races with viewing /proc/$pid/smaps).
> 
> There is various commentary within the mm on how to prevent this.  One way
> is to disable interrupts, relying on that to block rcu_sched or IPIs.
> I don't think the RT people are terribly happy about reading a proc file
> disabling interrupts, and it doesn't work for architectures that free
> page tables directly instead of batching them into an rcu_sched (because
> the IPI may not be sent to this CPU if the task has never run on it).
> 
> See "Fast GUP" in mm/gup.c
> 
> Ideally, I'd like rcu_read_lock() to delay page table reuse.  This is
> close to trivial for architectures which use entire pages or multiple
> pages for levels of their page tables as we can use the rcu_head embedded
> in struct page to queue the page for RCU.
> 
> s390 and powerpc are the only two architectures I know of that have
> levels of their page table that are smaller than their PAGE_SIZE.
> I'd like to discuss options.  There may be a complicated scheme that
> allows partial pages to be freed via RCU, but I have something simpler
> in mind.  For powerpc in particular, it can have a PAGE_SIZE of 64kB
> and then the MMU wants to see 4kB entries in the PMD.  I suggest that
> instead of allocating each 4kB entry individually, we allocate a 64kB
> page and fill in 16 consecutive PMDs.  This could cost a bit more memory
> (although if you've asked for a CONFIG_PAGE_SIZE of 64kB, you presumably
> don't care too much about it), but it'll make future page faults cheaper
> (as the PMDs will already be present, assuming you have good locality
> of reference).
> 
> I'd like to hear better ideas than this.

Some background on the situation for s390: The architecture defines
an 8 bit pagetable index, so we have 256 entries in a 2 KB pagetable,
but PAGE_SIZE is 4 KB. pte_alloc(_one) will use alloc_page() to allocate
a full 4 KB page, and then do some housekeeping to maintain a per-mm list
of such 4 KB pages, which will contain either one or two 2 KB pagetable
fragments.

This is also the reason why pgtable_t on s390 is not pointing to the
struct page of the (4 KB) page containing a 2 KB pagetable fragment, but
rather to the 2 KB pagetable itself.

I see at least two issues here, with using rcu_head embedded in the
struct page (for a 4 KB page):

1) There might be two 2 KB pagetables present in that 4 KB page,
and the rcu_head would affect both. Not sure if this would really be
a problem, because we already have a similar situation with the split
ptlock embedded in struct page, which also might lock two 2 KB pagetables,
i.e. more than necessary. It still is far less "over-locking" than
using mm->page_table_lock, and the move_pte() code e.g. takes care
to avoid a deadlock if src and dst ptlocks happen to be on the
same page.

So, a similar "over-locking" might also be possible and acceptable
for the rcu_head approach, but I do not really understand if that could
have some deadlock or other unwanted side-effects.

2) The "housekeeping" of our 2 KB pagetable fragments uses page->lru
to maintain the per-mm list. It also (mis)uses page->_refcount to mark
which 2 KB half is used/free, but that should not be an issue I guess.
Using page->lru will be an issue though. IIUC, then page->rcu_head will
overlay with page->lru, so using page->rcu_head for pagetable pages
on s390 would conflict with our page->lru usage for such pagetable pages.

I do not really see how that could be fixed, maybe we could find and
re-use other struct page members for our 2 KB fragment list. Also, for
kvm, there seem to be even more users of page->lru for pagetable pages,
in arch/s390/mm/gmap.c. Not sure though if those would actually also
affect "regular" pagetable walks, or if they are somehow independent.
But if we'd find some new list home for the 2 KB fragments, then that
could probably also be used for the gmap stuff.