Re: [RFC PATCH 24/37] mm: implement speculative handling in __do_fault()

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2021 at 06:44:49PM -0700, Michel Lespinasse wrote:
> In the speculative case, call the vm_ops->fault() method from within
> an rcu read locked section, and verify the mmap sequence lock at the
> start of the section. A match guarantees that the original vma is still
> valid at that time, and that the associated vma->vm_file stays valid
> while the vm_ops->fault() method is running.
> 
> Note that this implies that speculative faults can not sleep within
> the vm_ops->fault method. We will only attempt to fetch existing pages
> from the page cache during speculative faults; any miss (or prefetch)
> will be handled by falling back to non-speculative fault handling.
> 
> The speculative handling case also does not preallocate page tables,
> as it is always called with a pre-existing page table.

I still don't understand why you want to do this.  The speculative
fault that doesn't do I/O is already here, and it's called ->map_pages
(which I see you also do later).  So what's the point of this patch?