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Subject[RFC][PATCH] fs: do not prefault sys_write() user buffer pages
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Date

From: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>

=== Short summary ====

iov_iter_fault_in_readable() works around a really rare case
and we can avoid the deadlock it addresses in another way:
disable page faults and work around copy failures by faulting
after the copy in a slow path instead of before in a hot one.

I have a little microbenchmark that does repeated, small writes
to tmpfs. This patch speeds that micro up by 6.2%.

=== Long version ===

When doing a sys_write() we have a source buffer in userspace
and then a target file page.

If both of those are the same physical page, there is a potential
deadlock that we avoid. It would happen something like this:

1. We start the write to the file
2. Allocate page cache page and set it !Uptodate
3. Touch the userspace buffer to copy in the user data
4. Page fault (since source of the write not yet mapped)
5. Page fault code tries to lock the page and deadlocks

(more details on this below)

To avoid this, we prefault the page to guarantee that this fault
does not occur. But, this prefault comes at a cost. It is one
of the most expensive things that we do in a hot write() path
(especially if we compare it to the read path). It is working
around a pretty rare case.

To fix this, it's pretty simple. We move the "prefault"
code to run after we attempt the copy. We explicitly disable
page faults _during_ the copy, detect the copy failure,
then execute the "prefault" ouside of where the page lock
needs to be held.

iov_iter_copy_from_user_atomic() actually already has an
implicit pagefault_disable() inside of it (at least on
x86), but we add an explicit one. I don't think we can
depend on every kmap_atomic() implementation to
pagefault_disable() for eternity.

===================================================

The stack trace when this happens looks like this:

[<ffffffff81172130>] wait_on_page_bit_killable+0xc0/0xd0
[<ffffffff811721c4>] __lock_page_or_retry+0x84/0xa0
[<ffffffff811723cd>] filemap_fault+0x1ed/0x3d0
[<ffffffff81197841>] __do_fault+0x41/0xc0
[<ffffffff8119b8db>] handle_mm_fault+0x9bb/0x1210
[<ffffffff8109945f>] __do_page_fault+0x17f/0x3d0
[<ffffffff810996bc>] do_page_fault+0xc/0x10
[<ffffffff8183ba92>] page_fault+0x22/0x30
[<ffffffff8116ff1a>] generic_perform_write+0xca/0x1a0
[<ffffffff81171e30>] __generic_file_write_iter+0x190/0x1f0
[<ffffffff8126d659>] ext4_file_write_iter+0xe9/0x460
[<ffffffff811d027a>] __vfs_write+0xaa/0xe0
[<ffffffff811d0ae6>] vfs_write+0xa6/0x1a0
[<ffffffff811d1726>] SyS_write+0x46/0xa0
[<ffffffff81839f17>] entry_SYSCALL_64_fastpath+0x12/0x6a
[<ffffffffffffffff>] 0xffffffffffffffff

(Note, this does *NOT* happen in practice today because
the kmap_atomic() does a pagefault_disable(). The trace
above was obtained by taking out the pagefault_disable().)

You can trigger the deadlock with this little code snippet:

fd = open("foo", O_RDWR);
fdmap = mmap(NULL, len, PROT_WRITE|PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, fd, 0);
write(fd, &fdmap[0], 1);

Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <matthew.r.wilcox@intel.com>
Cc: Paul Cassella <cassella@cray.com>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
---

b/mm/filemap.c | 34 ++++++++++++++++++----------------
1 file changed, 18 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)

diff -puN mm/filemap.c~dont-prefault-on-write mm/filemap.c
--- a/mm/filemap.c~dont-prefault-on-write 2015-06-30 16:22:07.432935843 -0700
+++ b/mm/filemap.c 2015-06-30 16:22:07.437936070 -0700
@@ -2473,21 +2473,6 @@ ssize_t generic_perform_write(struct fil
iov_iter_count(i));

again:
- /*
- * Bring in the user page that we will copy from _first_.
- * Otherwise there's a nasty deadlock on copying from the
- * same page as we're writing to, without it being marked
- * up-to-date.
- *
- * Not only is this an optimisation, but it is also required
- * to check that the address is actually valid, when atomic
- * usercopies are used, below.
- */
- if (unlikely(iov_iter_fault_in_readable(i, bytes))) {
- status = -EFAULT;
- break;
- }
-
status = a_ops->write_begin(file, mapping, pos, bytes, flags,
&page, &fsdata);
if (unlikely(status < 0))
@@ -2495,8 +2480,17 @@ again:

if (mapping_writably_mapped(mapping))
flush_dcache_page(page);
-
+ /*
+ * 'page' is now locked. If we are trying to copy from a
+ * mapping of 'page' in userspace, the copy might fault and
+ * would need PageUptodate() to complete. But, page can not be
+ * made Uptodate without acquiring the page lock, which we hold.
+ * Deadlock. Avoid with pagefault_disable(). Fix up below with
+ * iov_iter_fault_in_readable().
+ */
+ pagefault_disable();
copied = iov_iter_copy_from_user_atomic(page, i, offset, bytes);
+ pagefault_enable();
flush_dcache_page(page);

status = a_ops->write_end(file, mapping, pos, bytes, copied,
@@ -2519,6 +2513,14 @@ again:
*/
bytes = min_t(unsigned long, PAGE_CACHE_SIZE - offset,
iov_iter_single_seg_count(i));
+ /*
+ * This is the fallback to recover if the copy from
+ * userspace above faults.
+ */
+ if (unlikely(iov_iter_fault_in_readable(i, bytes))) {
+ status = -EFAULT;
+ break;
+ }
goto again;
}
pos += copied;
_

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