Re: [PATCH v4 5/8] mm: Device exclusive memory access

[Ralph Campbell]

On 3/3/21 10:16 PM, Alistair Popple wrote:
> Some devices require exclusive write access to shared virtual
> memory (SVM) ranges to perform atomic operations on that memory. This
> requires CPU page tables to be updated to deny access whilst atomic
> operations are occurring.
>
> In order to do this introduce a new swap entry
> type (SWP_DEVICE_EXCLUSIVE). When a SVM range needs to be marked for
> exclusive access by a device all page table mappings for the particular
> range are replaced with device exclusive swap entries. This causes any
> CPU access to the page to result in a fault.
>
> Faults are resovled by replacing the faulting entry with the original
> mapping. This results in MMU notifiers being called which a driver uses
> to update access permissions such as revoking atomic access. After
> notifiers have been called the device will no longer have exclusive
> access to the region.
>
> Signed-off-by: Alistair Popple <apopple@xxxxxxxxxx>

I see in the next two patches how make_device_exclusive_entry() and
check_device_exclusive_range() are used. This points out a similar
problem that migrate_vma_setup() had before I added the
mmu_notifier_range_init_migrate() helper to pass a cookie from
migrate_vma_setup() to the invalidation callback so the device driver
could ignore an invalidation callback triggered by the caller and thus
resulting in a deadlock or having to invalidate device PTEs that
wouldn't be migrating.

I think you can eliminate the need for check_device_exclusive_range() in
the same way by adding a "void *" pointer to make_device_exclusive_entry()
and passing that through to try_to_protect(), setting rmap_walk_control rwc.arg
and then passing arg to mmu_notifier_range_init_migrate().
Although, maybe it would be better to define a new
mmu_notifier_range_init_exclusive() and event type MMU_NOTIFY_EXCLUSIVE so
that a device driver can revoke atomic/exclusive access but keep read/write
access to other parts of the page.

I thought about how make_device_exclusive_entry() is similar to hmm_range_fault()
and whether it would be possible to add a new HMM_PFN_REQ_EXCLUSIVE flag but I
see that make_device_exclusive_entry() returns the pages locked and with an
additional get_page() reference. This doesn't fit well with the other
hmm_range_fault() entries being returned as a "snapshot" so having a different
API makes sense. I think it would be useful to add a HMM_PFN_EXCLUSIVE flag so
that snapshots of the page tables can at least report that a page is exclusively
being accessed by *some* device. Unfortunately, there is no pgmap pointer to be
able to tell which device has exclusive access (since any struct page could be
exclusively accessed, not just device private ones).