Re: [RFC PATCH 0/8] mm/madvise: support process_madvise(MADV_DONTNEED)

[Michal Hocko]

On Mon 27-09-21 05:00:11, Nadav Amit wrote:
[...]
> The manager is notified on memory regions that it should monitor
> (through PTRACE/LD_PRELOAD/explicit-API). It then monitors these regions
> using the remote-userfaultfd that you saw on the second thread. When it wants
> to reclaim (anonymous) memory, it:
> 
> 1. Uses UFFD-WP to protect that memory (and for this matter I got a vectored
>    UFFD-WP to do so efficiently, a patch which I did not send yet).
> 2. Calls process_vm_readv() to read that memory of that process.
> 3. Write it back to “swap”.
> 4. Calls process_madvise(MADV_DONTNEED) to zap it.

Why cannot you use MADV_PAGEOUT/MADV_COLD for this usecase?

MADV_DONTNEED on a remote process has been proposed in the past several
times and it has always been rejected because it is a free ticket to all
sorts of hard to debug problems as it is just a free ticket for a remote
memory corruption. An additional capability requirement might reduce the
risk to some degree but I still do not think this is a good idea.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs