The problem is that when we write to a file, the copy from userspace to
pagecache is first done with preemption disabled, so if the source address is
not immediately available the copy fails *and* *zeros* *the* *destination*.
This is a problem because a concurrent read (which admittedly is an odd thing
to do) might see zeros rather that was there before the write, or what was
there after, or some mixture of the two (any of these being a reasonable thing
to see).
If the copy did fail, it will immediately be retried with preemption
re-enabled so any transient problem with accessing the source won't cause an
error.
The first copying does not need to zero any uncopied bytes, and doing so
causes the problem. It uses copy_from_user_atomic rather than copy_from_user
so the simple expedient is to change copy_from_user_atomic to *not* zero out
bytes on failure.
The first of these two patches prepares for the change by fixing two places
which assume copy_from_user_atomic does zero the tail. The two usages are
very similar pieces of code which copy from a userspace iovec into one or more
page-cache pages. These are changed to remove the assumption.
The second patch changes __copy_from_user_inatomic* to not zero the tail.
Once these are accepted, I will look at similar patches of other architectures
where this is important (ppc, mips and sparc being the ones I can find).
This patch:
There is a problem with __copy_from_user_inatomic zeroing the tail of the
buffer in the case of an error. As it is called in atomic context, the error
may be transient, so it results in zeros being written where maybe they
shouldn't be.
In the usage in filemap, this opens a window for a well timed read to see data
(zeros) which is not consistent with any ordering of reads and writes.
Most cases where __copy_from_user_inatomic is called, a failure results in
__copy_from_user being called immediately. As long as the latter zeros the
tail, the former doesn't need to. However in *copy_from_user_iovec
implementations (in both filemap and ntfs/file), it is assumed that
copy_from_user_inatomic will zero the tail.
This patch removes that assumption, so that after this patch it will
be safe for copy_from_user_inatomic to not zero the tail.
This patch also adds some commentary to filemap.h and asm-i386/uaccess.h.
After this patch, all architectures that might disable preempt when
kmap_atomic is called need to have their __copy_from_user_inatomic* "fixed".
This includes
- powerpc
- i386
- mips
- sparc
Signed-off-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cantab.net>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
Cc: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Use the x86 cache-bypassing copy instructions for copy_from_user().
Some performance data are
Total of GLOBAL_POWER_EVENTS (CPU cycle samples)
2.6.12.4.orig 1921587
2.6.12.4.nt 1599424
1599424/1921587=83.23% (16.77% reduction)
BSQ_CACHE_REFERENCE (L3 cache miss)
2.6.12.4.orig 57427
2.6.12.4.nt 20858
20858/57427=36.32% (63.7% reduction)
L3 cache miss reduction of __copy_from_user_ll
samples %
37408 65.1412 vmlinux __copy_from_user_ll
23 0.1103 vmlinux __copy_user_zeroing_intel_nocache
23/37408=0.061% (99.94% reduction)
Top 5 of 2.6.12.4.nt
Counted GLOBAL_POWER_EVENTS events (time during which processor is not stopped) with a unit mask of 0x01 (mandatory) count 100000
samples % app name symbol name
128392 8.0274 vmlinux __copy_user_zeroing_intel_nocache
64206 4.0143 vmlinux journal_add_journal_head
59746 3.7355 vmlinux do_get_write_access
47674 2.9807 vmlinux journal_put_journal_head
46021 2.8774 vmlinux journal_dirty_metadata
pattern9-0-cpu4-0-09011728/summary.out
Counted BSQ_CACHE_REFERENCE events (cache references seen by the bus unit) with a unit mask of 0x3f (multiple flags) count 3000
samples % app name symbol name
69755 4.2861 vmlinux __copy_user_zeroing_intel_nocache
55685 3.4215 vmlinux journal_add_journal_head
52371 3.2179 vmlinux __find_get_block
45504 2.7960 vmlinux journal_put_journal_head
36005 2.2123 vmlinux journal_stop
pattern9-0-cpu4-0-09011744/summary.out
Counted BSQ_CACHE_REFERENCE events (cache references seen by the bus unit) with a unit mask of 0x200 (read 3rd level cache miss) count 3000
samples % app name symbol name
1147 5.4994 vmlinux journal_add_journal_head
881 4.2240 vmlinux journal_dirty_data
872 4.1809 vmlinux blk_rq_map_sg
734 3.5192 vmlinux journal_commit_transaction
617 2.9582 vmlinux radix_tree_delete
pattern9-0-cpu4-0-09011731/summary.out
iozone results are
original 2.6.12.4 CPU time = 207.768 sec
cache aware CPU time = 184.783 sec
(three times run)
184.783/207.768=88.94% (11.06% reduction)
original:
pattern9-0-cpu4-0-08191720/iozone.out: CPU Utilization: Wall time 45.997 CPU time 64.527 CPU utilization 140.28 %
pattern9-0-cpu4-0-08191741/iozone.out: CPU Utilization: Wall time 46.878 CPU time 71.933 CPU utilization 153.45 %
pattern9-0-cpu4-0-08191743/iozone.out: CPU Utilization: Wall time 45.152 CPU time 71.308 CPU utilization 157.93 %
cache awre:
pattern9-0-cpu4-0-09011728/iozone.out: CPU Utilization: Wall time 44.842 CPU time 62.465 CPU utilization 139.30 %
pattern9-0-cpu4-0-09011731/iozone.out: CPU Utilization: Wall time 44.718 CPU time 59.273 CPU utilization 132.55 %
pattern9-0-cpu4-0-09011744/iozone.out: CPU Utilization: Wall time 44.367 CPU time 63.045 CPU utilization 142.10 %
Signed-off-by: Hiro Yoshioka <hyoshiok@miraclelinux.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch reworks filemap_xip.c with the goal to reduce code duplication
from mm/filemap.c. It applies agains 2.6.12-rc6-mm1. Instead of
implementing the aio functions, this one implements the synchronous
read/write functions only. For readv and writev, the generic fallback is
used. For aio, we rely on the application doing the fallback. Since our
"synchronous" function does memcpy immediately anyway, there is no
performance difference between using the fallbacks or implementing each
operation.
Signed-off-by: Carsten Otte <cotte@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
- generic_file* file operations do no longer have a xip/non-xip split
- filemap_xip.c implements a new set of fops that require get_xip_page
aop to work proper. all new fops are exported GPL-only (don't like to
see whatever code use those except GPL modules)
- __xip_unmap now uses page_check_address, which is no longer static
in rmap.c, and defined in linux/rmap.h
- mm/filemap.h is now much more clean, plainly having just Linus'
inline funcs moved here from filemap.c
- fix includes in filemap_xip to make it build cleanly on i386
Signed-off-by: Carsten Otte <cotte@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
