[PATCH v1] drm/ttm: Refcount allocated tail pages

[Dmitry Osipenko]

On 8/18/22 01:57, Dmitry Osipenko wrote:
> On 8/15/22 18:54, Dmitry Osipenko wrote:
>> On 8/15/22 17:57, Dmitry Osipenko wrote:
>>> On 8/15/22 16:53, Christian König wrote:
>>>> Am 15.08.22 um 15:45 schrieb Dmitry Osipenko:
>>>>> [SNIP]
>>>>>> Well that comment sounds like KVM is doing the right thing, so I'm
>>>>>> wondering what exactly is going on here.
>>>>> KVM actually doesn't hold the page reference, it takes the temporal
>>>>> reference during page fault and then drops the reference once page is
>>>>> mapped, IIUC. Is it still illegal for TTM? Or there is a possibility for
>>>>> a race condition here?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Well the question is why does KVM grab the page reference in the first
>>>> place?
>>>>
>>>> If that is to prevent the mapping from changing then yes that's illegal
>>>> and won't work. It can always happen that you grab the address, solve
>>>> the fault and then immediately fault again because the address you just
>>>> grabbed is invalidated.
>>>>
>>>> If it's for some other reason than we should probably investigate if we
>>>> shouldn't stop doing this.
>>>
>>> CC: +Paolo Bonzini who introduced this code
>>>
>>> commit add6a0cd1c5ba51b201e1361b05a5df817083618
>>> Author: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini at redhat.com>
>>> Date:   Tue Jun 7 17:51:18 2016 +0200
>>>
>>>     KVM: MMU: try to fix up page faults before giving up
>>>
>>>     The vGPU folks would like to trap the first access to a BAR by setting
>>>     vm_ops on the VMAs produced by mmap-ing a VFIO device.  The fault
>>> handler
>>>     then can use remap_pfn_range to place some non-reserved pages in the
>>> VMA.
>>>
>>>     This kind of VM_PFNMAP mapping is not handled by KVM, but follow_pfn
>>>     and fixup_user_fault together help supporting it.  The patch also
>>> supports
>>>     VM_MIXEDMAP vmas where the pfns are not reserved and thus subject to
>>>     reference counting.
>>>
>>> @Paolo,
>>> https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/73e5ed8d-0d25-7d44-8fa2-e1d61b1f5a04@amd.com/T/#m7647ce5f8c4749599d2c6bc15a2b45f8d8cf8154
>>>
>>
>> If we need to bump the refcount only for VM_MIXEDMAP and not for
>> VM_PFNMAP, then perhaps we could add a flag for that to the kvm_main
>> code that will denote to kvm_release_page_clean whether it needs to put
>> the page?
> 
> The other variant that kind of works is to mark TTM pages reserved using
> SetPageReserved/ClearPageReserved, telling KVM not to mess with the page
> struct. But the potential consequences of doing this are unclear to me.
> 
> Christian, do you think we can do it?

Although, no. It also doesn't work with KVM without additional changes
to KVM.

-- 
Best regards,
Dmitry