Re: [PATCH] mm: fix page_mkclean_one (was: 2.6.19 file content corruption on ext3)

[Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>]

On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 12:01 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> What do you guys think? Does something like this work out for S/390 too? I
> tried to make that "ptep_flush_dirty()" concept work for architectures
> that hide the dirty bit somewhere else too, but..

For s390 there are two aspects to consider:
1) the pte values are 100% software controlled. They only change because
a cpu stored a value to it or issued one of the specialized instructions
(csp, ipte and idte). The ptep_flush_dirty would be a nop for s390.
2) ptep_exchange is a bit dangerous. For s390 we need a lock that
protects the software controlled updates of the ptes. The reason is the
ipte instruction. It is implemented by the machine microcode in a
non-atomic way in regard to the memory. It reads the byte of the pte
that contains the invalid bit, flushes the tlb entries for it and then
writes back the byte with the invalid bit set. The microcode makes sure
that this pte cannot be used for form a new tlb on any cpu while the
ipte is in progress.
That means a compare-and-swap semantics on ptes won't work together with
the ipte optimization. As long as there is the pte lock that protects
all software accesses to the pte we are fine. But if any code expects
that ptep_exchange does something like an xchg things break.

-- 
blue skies,
  Martin.

Martin Schwidefsky
Linux for zSeries Development & Services
IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH

"Reality continues to ruin my life." - Calvin.