Re: [PATCH 12/41] mm: add per-VMA lock and helper functions to control it

[Jann Horn]

+locking maintainers

On Mon, Jan 9, 2023 at 9:54 PM Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Introduce a per-VMA rw_semaphore to be used during page fault handling
> instead of mmap_lock. Because there are cases when multiple VMAs need
> to be exclusively locked during VMA tree modifications, instead of the
> usual lock/unlock patter we mark a VMA as locked by taking per-VMA lock
> exclusively and setting vma->lock_seq to the current mm->lock_seq. When
> mmap_write_lock holder is done with all modifications and drops mmap_lock,
> it will increment mm->lock_seq, effectively unlocking all VMAs marked as
> locked.
[...]
> +static inline void vma_read_unlock(struct vm_area_struct *vma)
> +{
> +       up_read(&vma->lock);
> +}

One thing that might be gnarly here is that I think you might not be
allowed to use up_read() to fully release ownership of an object -
from what I remember, I think that up_read() (unlike something like
spin_unlock()) can access the lock object after it's already been
acquired by someone else. So if you want to protect against concurrent
deletion, this might have to be something like:

rcu_read_lock(); /* keeps vma alive */
up_read(&vma->lock);
rcu_read_unlock();

But I'm not entirely sure about that, the locking folks might know better.

Also, it might not matter given that the rw_semaphore part is removed
in the current patch 41/41 anyway...