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Date:      Sat, 19 Jun 2010 11:19:07 -0500
From:      Alan Cox <alc@cs.rice.edu>
To:        Juli Mallett <jmallett@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        freebsd-mips@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Merging 64 bit changes to -HEAD - part 2
Message-ID:  <4C1CEDFB.9070802@cs.rice.edu>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTil9mqyeWkSUzasZqwfZL4hmeIq-29FXVddc4Q33@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <20100617.100235.195066307596264499.imp@bsdimp.com> <AANLkTimkF47RlysFOrma0YhWNDw2w5Lcp9SB1bBoPuxW@mail.gmail.com> <4B66E1A4-E2A5-471F-9FA4-38B506797272@lakerest.net> <20100617.110504.200754750200158040.imp@bsdimp.com> <763BEBBB-B85A-44CE-BFEE-0BADEFF3C185@lakerest.net> <AANLkTikpOaSmTYVfqavtz8T4vZoHWc2CtXIy4SbLlGje@mail.gmail.com> <AANLkTimFjAoXuA-QDwXAOJ0mXK0okIME9SF3841T49zj@mail.gmail.com> <AANLkTil9mqyeWkSUzasZqwfZL4hmeIq-29FXVddc4Q33@mail.gmail.com>

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On 6/19/2010 5:18 AM, Juli Mallett wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 12:41, Neel Natu<neelnatu@gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> Hi JC,
>>
>> But what you really want here is to eliminate the intr_disable() and
>> intr_restore() and keep sched_pin() and  sched_unpin().
>>      
> Are you sure?  I'm not.  By disabling interrupts we only have to
> ensure that the fault path on any address we might access within those
> routines doesn't need to use the large memory map.  This isn't
> trivial, but I think we can acquire a reasonable confidence about it.
> If we merely pin, we have to ensure that nothing else that can run
> (including interrupts and threads that run via preemption) that would
> access the large memory map — given that this includes routines like
> pmap_zero_page, I think there's good reason for caution.  Disabling
> interrupts is more conservative, but I think rightly-so.  I may be
> mistaken.
>    

You're not mistaken.  See, for example, the i386 pmap_zero_page().  
Pinning by itself is insufficient because a pinned thread can be 
preempted, and the thread that then runs (on the same processor) could 
call pmap_zero_page().  So, pinning must be combined with a 
per-processor mutex.

I can imagine that blocking interrupts on mips is cheaper than the 
combination of pinning and a mutex.  However, do you want to have 
interrupts blocked for the time it takes to read 4KB from DRAM and write 
4KB to DRAM for pmap_copy_page()?  Ultimately, that's the question that 
you need to answer.

Alan






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