Re: [PATCH RFC 0/3] Add dirty-tracking infrastructure fornon-page-backed address spaces

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 12:12 AM, Thomas Hellstrom
<thellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 11/19/2013 11:51 PM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>
>> On 11/19/2013 12:06 PM, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> Before going any further with this I'd like to check whether this is an
>>> acceptable way to go.
>>> Background:
>>> GPU buffer objects in general and vmware svga GPU buffers in
>>> particular are mapped by user-space using MIXEDMAP or PFNMAP. Sometimes
>>> the
>>> address space is backed by a set of pages, sometimes it's backed by PCI
>>> memory.
>>> In the latter case in particular, there is no way to track dirty regions
>>> using page_mkwrite() and page_mkclean(), other than allocating a bounce
>>> buffer and perform dirty tracking on it, and then copy data to the real
>>> GPU
>>> buffer. This comes with a big memory- and performance overhead.
>>>
>>> So I'd like to add the following infrastructure with a callback
>>> pfn_mkwrite()
>>> and a function mkclean_mapping_range(). Typically we will be cleaning a
>>> range
>>> of ptes rather than random ptes in a vma.
>>> This comes with the extra benefit of being usable when the backing memory
>>> of
>>> the GPU buffer is not coherent with the GPU itself, and where we either
>>> need
>>> to flush caches or move data to synchronize.
>>>
>>> So this is a RFC for
>>> 1) The API. Is it acceptable? Any other suggestions if not?
>>> 2) Modifying apply_to_page_range(). Better to make a standalone
>>> non-populating version?
>>> 3) tlb- mmu- and cache-flushing calls. I've looked at
>>> unmap_mapping_range()
>>> and page_mkclean_one() to try to get it right, but still unsure.
>>
>> Most (all?) architectures have real dirty tracking -- you can mark a pte
>> as "clean" and the hardware (or arch code) will mark it dirty when
>> written, *without* a page fault.
>>
>> I'm not convinced that it works completely correctly right now (I
>> suspect that there are some TLB flushing issues on the dirty->clean
>> transition), and it's likely prone to bit-rot, since the page cache
>> doesn't rely on it.
>>
>> That being said, using hardware dirty tracking should be *much* faster
>> and less latency-inducing than doing it in software like this.  It may
>> be worth trying to get HW dirty tracking working before adding more page
>> fault-based tracking.
>>
>> (I think there's also some oddity on S/390.  I don't know what that
>> oddity is or whether you should care.)
>>
>> --Andy
>
>
> Andy,
>
> Thanks for the tip. It indeed sounds interesting, however there are a couple
> of culprits:
>
> 1) As you say, it sounds like there might be TLB flushing issues. Let's say
> the TLB detects a write and raises an IRQ for the arch code to set the PTE
> dirty bit, and before servicing that interrupt, we clear the PTE and flush
> that TLB. What will happen?

This should be fine.  I assume that all architectures that do this
kind of software dirty tracking will make the write block until the
fault is handled, so the write won't have happened when you clear the
PTE.  After the TLB flush, the PTE will become dirty again and then
the page will be written.

> And if the TLB hardware would write directly to
> the in-memory PTE I guess we'd have the same synchronization issues. I guess
> we'd then need an atomic read-modify-write against the TLB hardware?

IIRC the part that looked fishy to me was the combination of hw dirty
tracking and write protecting the page.  If you see that the pte is
clean and want to write protect it, you probably need to set the write
protect bit (atomically so you don't lose a dirty bit), flush the TLB,
and then check the dirty bit again.

> 2) Even if most hardware is capable of this stuff, I'm not sure what would
> happen in a virtual machine. Need to check.

This should be fine.  Any VM monitor that fails to implement dirty
tracking is probably terminally broken.

> 3) For dirty contents that need to appear on a screen within a short
> interval, we need the write notification anyway, to start a delayed task
> that will gather the dirty data and flush it to the screen...
>

So that's what you want to do :)

I bet that the best approach is some kind of hybrid.  If, on the first
page fault per frame, you un-write-protected the entire buffer and
then, near the end of the frame, check all the hw dirty bits and
re-write-protect the entire buffer, you get the benefit detecting
which pages were written, but you only take one write fault per frame
instead of one write fault per page.

(I imagine that there are video apps out that there that would slow
down measurably if they started taking one write fault per page per
frame.)

--Andy
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