Re: [PATCH] tools/testing/selftests/vm/mlock2-tests: fix mlock2 false-negative errors

[Michal Hocko]

On Mon 23-03-20 15:29:43, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Mon 23-03-20 10:16:59, Rafael Aquini wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 09:31:04AM -0700, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> > > On Sat, Mar 21, 2020 at 6:35 PM Rafael Aquini <aquini@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Changes for commit 9c4e6b1a7027f ("mm, mlock, vmscan: no more skipping pagevecs")
> > > > break this test expectations on the behavior of mlock syscall family immediately
> > > > inserting the recently faulted pages into the UNEVICTABLE_LRU, when MCL_ONFAULT is
> > > > passed to the syscall as part of its flag-set.
> > > 
> > > mlock* syscalls do not provide any guarantee that the pages will be in
> > > unevictable LRU, only that the pages will not be paged-out. The test
> > > is checking something very internal to the kernel and this is expected
> > > to break.
> > 
> > It was a check expected to be satisfied before the commit, though. 
> > Getting the mlocked pages inserted directly into the unevictable LRU,
> > skipping the pagevec, was established behavior before the aforementioned
> > commit, and even though one could argue userspace should not be aware,
> > or care, about such inner kernel circles the program in question is not an 
> > ordinary userspace app, but a kernel selftest that is supposed to check
> > for the functionality correctness.
> 
> But mlock (in neither mode) is reall forced to put pages to the

ble I meant to say "is not really forced"

> UNEVICTABLE_LRU for correctness. If the test is really depending on it
> then the selftest is bogus. A real MCL_ONFAULT test should focus on the
> user observable contract of this api. And that is that a new mapping
> doesn't fault in the page during the mlock call but the memory is locked
> after the memory is faulted in. You can use different methods to observe
> locked memory - e.g. try to reclaim it and check or check /proc/<pid>/smaps

I have just checked the testcase and I believe it is really dubious to
check for page flags. Those are really an internal implementation
detail. All the available information is available in the
/proc/<pid>/smaps file which is already parsed in the test so the test
is easily fixable.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs