[PATCH 0/5] mm: Break COW for pinned pages during fork()

[Peter Xu]

Finally I start to post formal patches because it's growing.  And also since
we've discussed quite some issues already, so I feel like it's clearer on what
we need to do, and how.

This series is majorly inspired by the previous discussion on the list [1],
starting from the report from Jason on the rdma test failure.  Linus proposed
the solution, which seems to be a very nice approach to avoid the breakage of
userspace apps that didn't use MADV_DONTFORK properly before.  More information
can be found in that thread too.

I believe the initial plan was to consider merging something like this for
rc7/rc8.  However now I'm not sure due to the fact that the code change in
copy_pte_range() is probably more than expected, so it can be with some risk.
I'll leave this question to the reviewers...

I tested it myself with fork() after vfio pinning a bunch of device pages, and
I verified that the new copy pte logic worked as expected at least in the most
general path.  However I didn't test thp case yet because afaict vfio does not
support thp backed dma pages.  Luckily, the pmd/pud thp patch is much more
straightforward than the pte one, so hopefully it can be directly verified by
some code review plus some more heavy-weight rdma tests.

Patch 1:      Introduce mm.has_pinned (as single patch as suggested by Jason)
Patch 2-3:    Some slight rework on copy_page_range() path as preparation
Patch 4:      Early cow solution for pte copy for pinned pages
Patch 5:      Same as above, but for thp (pmd/pud).

Hugetlbfs fix is still missing, but as planned, that's not urgent so we can
work upon.  Comments greatly welcomed.

Thanks.

Peter Xu (5):
  mm: Introduce mm_struct.has_pinned
  mm/fork: Pass new vma pointer into copy_page_range()
  mm: Rework return value for copy_one_pte()
  mm: Do early cow for pinned pages during fork() for ptes
  mm/thp: Split huge pmds/puds if they're pinned when fork()

 include/linux/mm.h       |   2 +-
 include/linux/mm_types.h |  10 ++
 kernel/fork.c            |   3 +-
 mm/gup.c                 |   6 ++
 mm/huge_memory.c         |  26 +++++
 mm/memory.c              | 226 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----
 6 files changed, 248 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-)

-- 
2.26.2