[PATCH hmm 00/15] Consolidate the mmu notifier interval_tree and locking

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 10:58:02AM +0200, Christian König wrote:
> Am 15.10.19 um 20:12 schrieb Jason Gunthorpe:
> > From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg at mellanox.com>
> > 
> > 8 of the mmu_notifier using drivers (i915_gem, radeon_mn, umem_odp, hfi1,
> > scif_dma, vhost, gntdev, hmm) drivers are using a common pattern where
> > they only use invalidate_range_start/end and immediately check the
> > invalidating range against some driver data structure to tell if the
> > driver is interested. Half of them use an interval_tree, the others are
> > simple linear search lists.
> > 
> > Of the ones I checked they largely seem to have various kinds of races,
> > bugs and poor implementation. This is a result of the complexity in how
> > the notifier interacts with get_user_pages(). It is extremely difficult to
> > use it correctly.
> > 
> > Consolidate all of this code together into the core mmu_notifier and
> > provide a locking scheme similar to hmm_mirror that allows the user to
> > safely use get_user_pages() and reliably know if the page list still
> > matches the mm.
> 
> That sounds really good, but could you outline for a moment how that is
> archived?

It uses the same basic scheme as hmm and rdma odp, outlined in the
revisions to hmm.rst later on.

Basically, 

 seq = mmu_range_read_begin(&mrn);

 // This is a speculative region
 .. get_user_pages()/hmm_range_fault() ..
 // Result cannot be derferenced

 take_lock(driver->update);
 if (mmu_range_read_retry(&mrn, range.notifier_seq) {
    // collision! The results are not correct
    goto again
 }

 // no collision, and now under lock. Now we can de-reference the pages/etc
 // program HW
 // Now the invalidate callback is responsible to synchronize against changes
 unlock(driver->update) 

Basically, anything that was using hmm_mirror correctly transisions
over fairly trivially, just with the modification to store a sequence
number to close that race described in the hmm commit.

For something like AMD gpu I expect it to transition to use dma_fence
from the notifier for coherency right before it unlocks driver->update.

Jason