[PATCH] [ARM] Do not call flush_cache_user_range with mmap_sem held

[Dima Zavin]

Jamie/Russell,

Thanks for the feedback.

>> read-write locks will block a reader when there is a already blocked
>> writer.  Otherwise the writer can be permanently starved due to new
>> readers always arriving so reader count doesn't reach zero.

That's precisely the problem.

> Hmm, true, and rather unfortunate.
>
> As I've already said, we can not do this cache maintainence outside of
> the lock.
>
> The point of this code is to first validate that the region we're working
> on is valid.  As soon as we drop the lock, we lose the guarantee that
> the region is valid while we operate on it - indeed, the region could be
> unmapped and remapped by a different thread.

So what if it was remapped? The worst case scenario in this case is
that we needlessly flush a region of memory, but its not "wrong". It
can't be any worse than just doing a full cache flush. If another
thread unmapped the region, then we should (and will) segfault the
flushing thread, which is the correct behavior IMHO.

--Dima

> I think the only reasonable solution is to also walk the page tables
> and do the cache handling on a per-page basis, which will make this
> interface quite a bit slower - but that's the price we pay for
> correctness.


>