Re: [Xen-devel] Fwd: Re: struct page field arrangement

[Keir Fraser <keir@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 16/3/07 14:13, "Keir Fraser" <keir@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Either we are in stop_machine context, or we have offlined all other CPUs
> via cpu hotplug. In the absence of involuntary preemption it's therefore
> safe to proceed without locking. But probably inadvisable (we'd like to
> support full CONFIG_PREEMPT sometime in the future)... I think the 386 code
> should be changed to match x86/64.

Actually it's not so easy. We walk the pgd_list and so do not have the mm
associated with the pgd. And in some cases there may not be an mm, if we
walk the list after a pgd is allocated but before it is attached to an mm.

So I think we should simply disable preemption in the i386 case. Which is
done easily by simply taking the pgd_lock (which it would be polite to do
anyway, since we're walking the pgd_list). With preemption disabled we're
definitely safe because pinning is non-blocking and all other CPUs are
safely spinning in stop_machine or have been offlined.

Actually preemption is already disabled by the caller (for a different
reason) but it's not nice to rely on that.

 -- Keir


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