Re: [PATCH v1 0/5] arm64/mm: uffd write-protect and soft-dirty tracking

[David Hildenbrand]

> > > > We further recently added a new UFFD_FEATURE_WP_ASYNC feature as part of
> > > > [2], because getting soft-dirty return reliable results in some cases turned
> > > > out rather hard to fix.
>
> But it sounds like the current soft-dirty semantic is sufficient for CRIU on
> other arches? If I understood correctly from my brief scan of the linked post,
> the problem is that soft-dirty can sometimes provide false-positives? So could
> result in uneccessary copy, but never lost data?

Yes, it seems to be good enough for them in that regard I think.

[...]

> > > > But I'll throw in another idea: do we really need soft-dirty and uffd-wp to
> > > > exist at the same time in the same process (or the VMA?). In theory, we
>
> My instinct is that MUXing a PTE bit like this will lead to some subtle problems
> that won't appear on arches that support either one or both of the features
> independently and unconditionally. Surely better to limit ourselves to either
> "arm64 will only support uffd-wp" or "arm64 will support both uffd-wp and
> soft-dirty". That way, we could move ahead with reviewing/merging the uffd-wp
> support asynchronously to deciding whether we want to support soft-dirty.

Yes. MUXing would require some work, but likely better than wasting 1/64 
PTE space on a corner case feature with one famous user that might be 
able to port to an alternative with other active users (growing ;) ).

Anyhow, I don't maintain arm64 code and we have to carry that baggage in 
the core either way for the time being ...

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb