[RFC PATCH RESEND 00/28] per-VMA locks proposal

[Vlastimil Babka]

On 9/2/22 01:26, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 1:58 PM Kent Overstreet
> <kent.overstreet at linux.dev> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 01, 2022 at 10:34:48AM -0700, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
>> > Resending to fix the issue with the In-Reply-To tag in the original
>> > submission at [4].
>> >
>> > This is a proof of concept for per-vma locks idea that was discussed
>> > during SPF [1] discussion at LSF/MM this year [2], which concluded with
>> > suggestion that “a reader/writer semaphore could be put into the VMA
>> > itself; that would have the effect of using the VMA as a sort of range
>> > lock. There would still be contention at the VMA level, but it would be an
>> > improvement.” This patchset implements this suggested approach.
>> >
>> > When handling page faults we lookup the VMA that contains the faulting
>> > page under RCU protection and try to acquire its lock. If that fails we
>> > fall back to using mmap_lock, similar to how SPF handled this situation.
>> >
>> > One notable way the implementation deviates from the proposal is the way
>> > VMAs are marked as locked. Because during some of mm updates multiple
>> > VMAs need to be locked until the end of the update (e.g. vma_merge,
>> > split_vma, etc). Tracking all the locked VMAs, avoiding recursive locks
>> > and other complications would make the code more complex. Therefore we
>> > provide a way to "mark" VMAs as locked and then unmark all locked VMAs
>> > all at once. This is done using two sequence numbers - one in the
>> > vm_area_struct and one in the mm_struct. VMA is considered locked when
>> > these sequence numbers are equal. To mark a VMA as locked we set the
>> > sequence number in vm_area_struct to be equal to the sequence number
>> > in mm_struct. To unlock all VMAs we increment mm_struct's seq number.
>> > This allows for an efficient way to track locked VMAs and to drop the
>> > locks on all VMAs at the end of the update.
>>
>> I like it - the sequence numbers are a stroke of genuius. For what it's doing
>> the patchset seems almost small.
> 
> Thanks for reviewing it!
> 
>>
>> Two complaints so far:
>>  - I don't like the vma_mark_locked() name. To me it says that the caller
>>    already took or is taking the lock and this function is just marking that
>>    we're holding the lock, but it's really taking a different type of lock. But
>>    this function can block, it really is taking a lock, so it should say that.
>>
>>    This is AFAIK a new concept, not sure I'm going to have anything good either,
>>    but perhaps vma_lock_multiple()?
> 
> I'm open to name suggestions but vma_lock_multiple() is a bit
> confusing to me. Will wait for more suggestions.

Well, it does act like a vma_write_lock(), no? So why not that name. The
checking function for it is even called vma_assert_write_locked().

We just don't provide a single vma_write_unlock(), but a
vma_mark_unlocked_all(), that could be instead named e.g.
vma_write_unlock_all().
But it's called on a mm, so maybe e.g. mm_vma_write_unlock_all()?