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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2009-02-01 14:00:16 -0500
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2009-02-01 14:00:16 -0500
commit27421e211a39784694b597dbf35848b88363c248 (patch)
tree8d9a06e453c40dea7db3a3d0d9d3d864690427db /kernel/module.c
parent45c82b5a770be66845687a7d027c8b52946d59af (diff)
Manually revert "mlock: downgrade mmap sem while populating mlocked regions"
This essentially reverts commit 8edb08caf68184fb170f4f69c7445929e199eaea. 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: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'kernel/module.c')
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