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.
(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:
projects / linux-beck.git / commit