On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 10:54 AM, Rik van Riel <r...@redhat.com> wrote: > > Would tlb_fix_spurious_fault take care of that on those > architectures?
.. assuming that they implement it as a real TLB flush, yes. But maybe the architecture never noticed that it happened to depend on the fact that we do a cross-CPU invalidate? So a missing tlb_fix_spurious_fault() implementation could cause a short loop of repeated page faults, until the IPI happens. And it would be so incredibly rare that nobody would ever have noticed. And if that could have happened, then with the cross-cpu invalidate removed, the "incredibly rare short-lived constant page fault retry" could turn into "incredibly rare lockup due to infinite page fault retry due to TLB entry that never turns dirty despite it being marked dirty by SW in the in-memory page tables". Very unlikely, I agree. And this is only relevant for the non-x86 case, so changing the x86-specific optimized version is an independent issue. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/