Re: [PATCH v6 1/2] mm: Add MREMAP_DONTUNMAP to mremap().

[Andrew Morton]

On Tue, 18 Feb 2020 09:32:20 -0800 Brian Geffon <bgeffon@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> When remapping an anonymous, private mapping, if MREMAP_DONTUNMAP is
> set, the source mapping will not be removed. The remap operation
> will be performed as it would have been normally by moving over the
> page tables to the new mapping. The old vma will have any locked
> flags cleared, have no pagetables, and any userfaultfds that were
> watching that range will continue watching it.
> 
> For a mapping that is shared or not anonymous, MREMAP_DONTUNMAP will cause
> the mremap() call to fail. Because MREMAP_DONTUNMAP always results in moving
> a VMA you MUST use the MREMAP_MAYMOVE flag. The final result is two
> equally sized VMAs where the destination contains the PTEs of the source.
> 
> We hope to use this in Chrome OS where with userfaultfd we could write
> an anonymous mapping to disk without having to STOP the process or worry
> about VMA permission changes.
> 
> This feature also has a use case in Android, Lokesh Gidra has said
> that "As part of using userfaultfd for GC, We'll have to move the physical
> pages of the java heap to a separate location. For this purpose mremap
> will be used. Without the MREMAP_DONTUNMAP flag, when I mremap the java
> heap, its virtual mapping will be removed as well. Therefore, we'll
> require performing mmap immediately after. This is not only time consuming
> but also opens a time window where a native thread may call mmap and
> reserve the java heap's address range for its own usage. This flag
> solves the problem."

Thanks.

We're a bit thin on review activity on this one.  Has Lokesh been able
to review and preferably test the code?  Are you able to identify other
potential users?  perhaps even glibc?