Re: [RFC PATCH] mm, proc: report PR_SET_THP_DISABLE in proc

From: David Rientjes
Date: Thu Oct 04 2018 - 14:34:17 EST


On Thu, 4 Oct 2018, Michal Hocko wrote:

> > And prior to the offending commit, there were three ways to control thp
> > but two ways to determine if a mapping was eligible for thp based on the
> > implementation detail of one of those ways.
>
> Yes, it is really unfortunate that we have ever allowed to leak such an
> internal stuff like VMA flags to userspace.
>

Right, I don't like userspace dependencies on VmFlags in smaps myself, but
it's the only way we have available that shows whether a single mapping is
eligible to be backed by thp :/

> > If there are three ways to
> > control thp, userspace is still in the dark wrt which takes precedence
> > over the other: we have PR_SET_THP_DISABLE but globally sysfs has it set
> > to "always", or we have MADV_HUGEPAGE set per smaps but PR_SET_THP_DISABLE
> > shown in /proc/pid/status, etc.
> >
> > Which one is the ultimate authority?
>
> Isn't our documentation good enough? If not then we should document it
> properly.
>

No, because the offending commit actually changed the precedence itself:
PR_SET_THP_DISABLE used to be honored for future mappings and the commit
changed that for all current mappings. So as a result of the commit
itself we would have had to change the documentation and userspace can't
be expected to keep up with yet a fourth variable: kernel version. It
really needs to be simpler, just a per-mapping specifier.