Re: [PATCH 3/7] Add a UFFD_SECURE flag to the userfaultfd API.

[Andrea Arcangeli]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 01:05:47PM -0700, Daniel Colascione wrote:
> This is a debate that won't get resolved here. A ton of work has gone
> into namespaces, migration, various cgroup things, and so on, and I
> don't see that work getting torn out.

This is precisely why I thought it was a good idea to support the
non-cooperative use case too even though we had no immediate use for
it.

> Sure they can. Can't we stick processes in a memcg and set a
> memory.high threshold beyond which threads in that cgroup will enter
> direct reclaim on page allocations? I'd call that throttling.

The uffd-wp solution during the throttling can resolve a wrprotect
fault in the parent for every 4k page that has been written to disk
and it'll prioritize writing to disk those userfaults that are
currently blocked. I don't see how you could reach an equivalent
optimal runtime without uffd-wp and just with memcg because the
snapshot process won't have a clue which pages are been duped by the
COWs. The uffd-wp by avoding fork will also avoid more expensive MM
switches during the snapshot.

> This issue *has* to get fixed one way or another.

Sure.