Re: [PATCH] mm/madvise: allow MADV_DONTNEED to free memory that is MLOCK_ONFAULT

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri,  8 Jun 2018 14:56:52 -0400 Jason Baron <jbaron@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> In order to free memory that is marked MLOCK_ONFAULT, the memory region
> needs to be first unlocked, before calling MADV_DONTNEED. And if the region
> is to be reused as MLOCK_ONFAULT, we require another call to mlock2() with
> the MLOCK_ONFAULT flag.
> 
> Let's simplify freeing memory that is set MLOCK_ONFAULT, by allowing
> MADV_DONTNEED to work directly for memory that is set MLOCK_ONFAULT. The
> locked memory limits, tracked by mm->locked_vm do not need to be adjusted
> in this case, since they were charged to the entire region when
> MLOCK_ONFAULT was initially set.

Seems useful.

Is a manpage update planned?

Various updates to tools/testing/selftests/vm/* seem appropriate.

> Further, I don't think allowing MADV_FREE for MLOCK_ONFAULT regions makes
> sense, since the point of MLOCK_ONFAULT is for userspace to know when pages
> are locked in memory and thus to know when page faults will occur.

This sounds non-backward-compatible?