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SubjectRe: MMU & cache trick: page flips on COW?
   Date: 	Mon, 13 Jan 1997 20:10:27 +0100 (MET)
From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@pc5829.hil.siemens.at>

but if this all works, we could have hot cache for the process
continuing execution, for the price of N*(cost of invlpg+cost of
backmapping)+1, where N is the number of processes mapping the
page. At least for small 'N' and for Intel caches this looks like a
definit win ...

A win for the cache architecture in question, but:

1) Very machine specific, doesn't work at all in other
cache configurations (see below).

2) The implementation is messy, there is a better way
to do this.

Virtually indexed caches would not gain from this setup even if
physically tagged. The copy already requires a flush_page_to_ram() on
virtual indexed caches for both pages of the copy because of this.

If you truly want get around the no-write-allocate problem, do
something to the memcpy code itself which helps the situation. I
believe the memcpy etc. code in GNU libc written by Torbjourn Granlund
does in fact do a quick read of the first word in each cache line
being copied to in order to work around this problem specifically, and
the speed increase does show up.

The idea I had for making cow fault processing more cache friendly,
which neither made the situation better nor worse on physical caches,
and does tremendously improve performance on all virutally indexed
caches, was the following.

Instead of copying to/from the kernel pages, only use the kernel
mapping as the source of the copy, use the new user mapping as the
destination of the copy. You'd need to setup the pte beforehand to
allow the writes or else you'd fault recursively forever. So it looks
more like:

do_wp_page()
{
[ ... ]

if (mem_map[MAP_NR(old_page)].count != 1) {
if (new_page) {
if (PageReserved(mem_map + MAP_NR(old_page)))
++vma->vm_mm->rss;
flush_cache_page(vma, address);
set_pte(page_table, pte_mkwrite(pte_mkdirty(mk_pte(new_page, vma->vm_page_prot))));
flush_tlb_page(vma, address);
copy_cow_page(old_page,address);
flush_page_to_ram(old_page);
free_page(old_page);
return;
}
[ ... ]
}

A nice side effect is that this eliminates one of the
flush_page_to_ram() invocations, the one for the new page since we are
only writing to where the cache will finally "view" the data and thus
consistancy is guarenteed.

The above will not work unmodified, there is still a bug. You need to
only perform this optimization if vma->vm_mm == current->mm, if not
you have to perform the operation the old way. (this happens during
ptrace() writes to the inferier's address space, so you cannot assume
do_wp_page() is being run for current all the time, although this is
the most common case).

So this optimization plus the memcpy() hacks for no-write-allocate
caches is probably what you want to solve the problem at hand.

---------------------------------------------////
Yow! 11.26 MB/s remote host TCP bandwidth & ////
199 usec remote TCP latency over 100Mb/s ////
ethernet. Beat that! ////
-----------------------------------------////__________ o
David S. Miller, davem@caip.rutgers.edu /_____________/ / // /_/ ><

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