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  1. Feb 03, 2009
  3. Feb 02, 2009
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Manually revert "mlock: downgrade mmap sem while populating mlocked regions" · 27421e21
      Linus Torvalds authored 
      This essentially reverts commit 8edb08ca

.

It downgraded our mmap semaphore to a read-lock while mlocking pages, in
order to allow other threads (and external accesses like "ps" et al) to
walk the vma lists and take page faults etc.  Which is a nice idea, but
the implementation does not work.

Because we cannot upgrade the lock back to a write lock without
releasing the mmap semaphore, the code had to release the lock entirely
and then re-take it as a writelock.  However, that meant that the caller
possibly lost the vma chain that it was following, since now another
thread could come in and mmap/munmap the range.

The code tried to work around that by just looking up the vma again and
erroring out if that happened, but quite frankly, that was just a buggy
hack that doesn't actually protect against anything (the other thread
could just have replaced the vma with another one instead of totally
unmapping it).

The only way to downgrade to a read map _reliably_ is to do it at the
end, which is likely the right thing to do: do all the 'vma' operations
with the write-lock held, then downgrade to a read after completing them
all, and then do the "populate the newly mlocked regions" while holding
just the read lock.  And then just drop the read-lock and return to user
space.

The (perhaps somewhat simpler) alternative is to just make all the
callers of mlock_vma_pages_range() know that the mmap lock got dropped,
and just re-grab the mmap semaphore if it needs to mlock more than one
vma region.

So we can do this "downgrade mmap sem while populating mlocked regions"
thing right, but the way it was done here was absolutely not correct.
Thus the revert, in the expectation that we will do it all correctly
some day.

Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      27421e21
  5. Feb 01, 2009
  7. Jan 31, 2009