[ofa-general] Re: [patch] my mmu notifiers

[Robin Holt]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 01:52:06AM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 12:04:27AM +0100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> > OK (thanks to Robin as well). Now I understand why you are using it,
> > but I don't understand why you don't defer new TLBs after the point
> > where the linux pte changes. If you can do that, then you look and
> > act much more like a TLB from the point of view of the Linux vm.
> 
> Christoph was forced to put the invalidate_range callback _after_
> dropping the PT lock because xpmem has to wait I/O there. But
> invalidate_range is called after freeing the VM reference on the pages
> so then GRU needed a _range_begin too because GRU has to flush the tlb
> before the VM reference on the page is released (xpmem and KVM pin the
> pages mapped by the secondary mmu, GRU doesn't). So then
> invalidate_range was renamed to invalidate_range_end.

Currently, xpmem blocks faults for the range specified at the _begin
callout, then shoots down remote TLBs and does the put_page for all the
pages in the specified range.  The _end callout merely removes the block.
We do not do any wait for I/O.  By the time we return from the _begin
callout, all activity by the remotes is stopped, pages are dereferenced,
and future faults are blocked until released by the _end callout.

Thanks,
Robin