Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 5 Oct 2007 14:58:28 -0400 | From | Rik van Riel <> | Subject | Re: race with page_referenced_one->ptep_test_and_clear_young and pagetable setup/pulldown |
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On Fri, 5 Oct 2007 12:36:33 +0100 (BST) Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> wrote:
> To my naive mind, your problem actually lies in those two stages: > whatever marks the pages RO should not be keeping Xen in ignorance.
It does. Telling Xen to pin the page as a page table page is basically the first thing a Xen kernel does after marking the page read-only.
This makes for a narrow race window, during which ptep_test_and_clear_young cannot clear the referenced bit and may end up causing a crash. We do not care about it not clearing the referenced bit during that window, since it will be cleared during the next go-around and the race is very rare.
Hence, the only thing we need to fix is the crash.
We can do that by adding an entry for ptep_test_and_clear_young to the exception table. This way we do not need to turn this into a new paravirt ops hook (since the fast path is exactly the same as x86 native) and there is no need for added complexity.
Also, Xen would not conflict with SPLIT_PTLOCK_CPUS.
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