Re: [PATCH RFC] mm/madvise: introduce MADV_POPULATE to prefault/prealloc memory

[David Hildenbrand]

> > > >      If we hit
> > > >      hardware errors on pages, ignore them - nothing we really can or
> > > >      should do.
> > > > 3. On errors during MADV_POPULATED, some memory might have been
> > > >      populated. Callers have to clean up if they care.
> > >
> > > How does caller find out? madvise reports 0 on success so how do you
> > > find out how much has been populated?
> >
> > If there is an error, something might have been populated. In my QEMU
> > implementation, I simply discard the range again, good enough. I don't think
> > we need to really indicate "error and populated" or "error and not
> > populated".
>
> Agreed. The wording just suggests that the syscall actually provides any
> means for an effective way to handle those errors. Maybe you should just
> stick with the first sentence and drop the second.

Makes sense. "On errors during MADV_POPULATE, some memory might have 
been populated."

>   
> > > > 4. Concurrent changes to the virtual memory layour are tolerated - we
> > > >      process each and every PFN only once, though.
> > >
> > > I do not understand this. madvise is about virtual address space not a
> > > physical address space.
> >
> > What I wanted to express: if we detect a change in the mapping we don't
> > restart at the beginning, we always make forward progress. We process each
> > virtual address once (on a per-page basis, thus I accidentally used "PFN").
>
> This is an implicit assumption. Your range can have the same page mapped
> several times in the given address range and all you care about is that
> you fault those which are not present during the virtual address space
> walk. Your syscall can return and large part of the address space might
> be unpopulated because memory reclaim just dropped those pages and that
> would be fine. This shouldn't really imply memory presence - mlock does
> that.

"Concurrent changes to the virtual memory layout are tolerated. The 
range is processed exactly once."

> > > > 5. If MADV_POPULATE succeeds, all memory in the range can be accessed
> > > >      without SIGBUS. (of course, not if user space changed mappings in the
> > > >      meantime or KSM kicked in on anonymous memory).
> > >
> > > I do not see how KSM would change anything here and maybe it is not
> > > really important to mention it. KSM should be really transparent from
> > > the users space POV. Parallel and destructive virtual address space
> > > operations are also expected to change the outcome and there is nothing
> > > kernel do about at and provide any meaningful guarantees. I guess we
> > > want to assume a reasonable userspace behavior here.
> >
> > It's just a note that we cannot protect from someone interfering
> > (discard/ksm/whatever). I'm making that clearer in the cover letter.
>
> Again that is implicit expectation. madvise will not work for anybody
> shooting an own foot.

Okay, I'll drop that part, thanks!

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb