Re: Potential race in TLB flush batching?

[Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>]

On Sat, Jul 15, 2017 at 8:55 AM, Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> wrote:
> The patch looks fine to be but when writing the patch, I wondered why the
> original code disabled preemption before inc_mm_tlb_gen. I didn't spot
> the reason for it but given the importance of properly synchronising with
> switch_mm, I played it safe. However, this should be ok on top and
> maintain the existing sequences

LGTM.  You could also fold it into your patch or even put it before
your patch, too.

FWIW, I didn't have any real reason to inc_mm_tlb_gen() with
preemption disabled.  I think I did it because the code it replaced
was also called with preemption off.  That being said, it's
effectively a single instruction, so it barely matters latency-wise.
(Hmm.  Would there be a performance downside if a thread got preempted
between inc_mm_tlb_gen() and doing the flush?  It could arbitrarily
delay the IPIs, which would give a big window for something else to
flush and maybe make our IPIs unnecessary.  Whether that's a win or a
loss isn't so clear to me.)

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