On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 10:22 AM, Dave Hansen <dave.han...@intel.com> wrote:
On 12/03/2014 09:49 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
 On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 7:15 PM, Chris Mason <c...@fb.com> wrote:

 One guess is that trinity is generating a huge number of tlb
invalidations over sparse and horrible ranges. Perhaps the old code was falling back to full tlb flushes before Dave Hansen's string of fixes?

 Hmm. I agree that we've had some of the backtraces look like TLB
flushing might be involved. Not all, though. And I'm not seeing where a loop over up to 33 pages should matter over doing a full TLB flush.

What *might* matter is if we somehow get that number wrong, and the loops like

                         addr = f->flush_start;
                         while (addr < f->flush_end) {
                                 __flush_tlb_single(addr);
                                 addr += PAGE_SIZE;
                         }

ends up looping a *lot* due to some bug, and then the IPI itself would
 take so long that the watchdog could trigger.

But I do not see how that could actually happen. As far as I can tell, either the number of pages is limited to less than 33, or we have that
  TLB_FLUSH_ALL case.

 Do  you see something I don't?

The one thing I _do_ see now is a missed TLB flush is we're flushing one
page at the end of the address space.  We'd overflow flush_end back so
flush_end=0:

        if (!f->flush_end)
f->flush_end = f->flush_start + PAGE_SIZE; <-- overflow

and we'll never enter the while loop where we actually do the flush:

                        while (addr < f->flush_end) {
                                __flush_tlb_single(addr);
                                addr += PAGE_SIZE;
                        }

But we have a hole up there on x86_64, so this will never happen in
practice there. It might theoretically apply to 32-bit, but this still
doesn't help with the bug.

Oh, and the tracepoint is spitting out bogus numbers because we need
some parenthesis around the 'nr_pages' calculation.

Yeah, I didn't see any problems with your changes, but I was hoping that even a small change like doing 33 flushes at a time was pushing Dave's box just over the line.

-chris



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