[PATCH v2 10/10] arm64: mm: remove dsb from update_mmu_cache

Will Deacon will.deacon at arm.com
Tue Oct 6 10:46:30 PDT 2015


update_mmu_cache() consists of a dsb(ishst) instruction so that new user
mappings are guaranteed to be visible to the page table walker on
exception return.

In reality this can be a very expensive operation which is rarely needed.
Removing this barrier shows a modest improvement in hackbench scores and
, in the worst case, we re-take the user fault and establish that there
was nothing to do.

Reviewed-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas at arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com>
---
 arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h | 6 +++---
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h b/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
index 26b066690593..0d18e88e1cfa 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
+++ b/arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h
@@ -646,10 +646,10 @@ static inline void update_mmu_cache(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
 				    unsigned long addr, pte_t *ptep)
 {
 	/*
-	 * set_pte() does not have a DSB for user mappings, so make sure that
-	 * the page table write is visible.
+	 * We don't do anything here, so there's a very small chance of
+	 * us retaking a user fault which we just fixed up. The alternative
+	 * is doing a dsb(ishst), but that penalises the fastpath.
 	 */
-	dsb(ishst);
 }
 
 #define update_mmu_cache_pmd(vma, address, pmd) do { } while (0)
-- 
2.1.4




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