Re: [RFCv1 0/6] Page Detective

[Andi Kleen]

> - Quickly identify all user processes mapping a given page.

Can be done with /proc/*/pagemap today. Maybe it's not "quick"
because it won't use the rmap chains, but is that a serious
issue?

> - Determine if and where the kernel maps the page, which is also
> important given the opportunity to remove guest memory from the kernel
> direct map (as discussed at LPC'24).

At least x86 already has a kernel page table dumper in debugfs
that can be used for this. The value of a second redundant
one seems low.

> We also plan to extend this functionality to include KVM and IOMMU
> page tables in the future.

Yes dumpers for those would likely be useful.

(at least for the case when one hand is tied behind your back
by security policies forbidding /proc/kcore access)

> <pagemap> provides an interface to traversing through user page
> tables, but the other information cannot be extracted using the
> existing interfaces.

Like what? You mean the reference counts?

/proc/k* doesn't have any reference counts, and no space
for full counts, but I suspect usually all you need to know is a
few states like (>1, 1, 0, maybe negative) which could be mapped to a
few spare kpageflags bits.

That said I thought Willy wanted to move a lot of these
elsewhere anyways with the folio revolution, so it might 
be a short lived interface anyways.

-Andi