Note that the semantic of MAP_LOCKED can be subtly surprising:
"mlock(2) fails if the memory range cannot get populated to guarantee
that no future major faults will happen on the range.
mmap(MAP_LOCKED) on the other hand silently succeeds even if the
range was populated only
partially."
( from http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=143152790412727&w=2 )
So MAP_LOCKED can silently behave like MAP_LOCKONFAULT. While
MAP_LOCKONFAULT doesn't suffer from such problem, I wonder if that's
sufficient reason not to extend mmap by new mlock() flags that can
be instead applied to the VMA after mmapping, using the proposed
mlock2() with flags. So I think instead we could deprecate
MAP_LOCKED more prominently. I doubt the overhead of calling the
extra syscall matters here?
We could talk about retiring the MAP_LOCKED flag but I suspect that
would get significantly more pushback than adding a new mmap flag.
Likely that the overhead does not matter in most cases, but presumably
there are cases where it does (as we have a MAP_LOCKED flag today).
Even with the proposed new system calls I think we should have the
MAP_LOCKONFAULT for parity with MAP_LOCKED.
- mlock() takes a `flags' argument. Presently that's
MLOCK_LOCKED|MLOCK_LOCKONFAULT.
- munlock() takes a `flags' arument. MLOCK_LOCKED|MLOCK_LOCKONFAULT
to specify which flags are being cleared.
- mlockall() and munlockall() ditto.
IOW, LOCKED and LOCKEDONFAULT are treated identically and independently.
Now, that's how we would have designed all this on day one. And I
think we can do this now, by adding new mlock2() and munlock2()
syscalls. And we may as well deprecate the old mlock() and munlock(),
not that this matters much.
*should* we do this? I'm thinking "yes" - it's all pretty simple
boilerplate and wrappers and such, and it gets the interface correct,
and extensible.
If the new LOCKONFAULT functionality is indeed desired (I haven't
still decided myself) then I agree that would be the cleanest way.
Do you disagree with the use cases I have listed or do you think there
is a better way of addressing those cases?
What do others think?