Re: [LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] Per-process page size

[David Hildenbrand (Arm)]

On 2/23/26 13:49, Pedro Falcato wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 10:37:55AM +0530, Dev Jain wrote:
> > > I don't understand. What exactly are you trying to do here? Maintain 2
> > > different paging structures, one for core mm and the other for the arch? As
> > > done in architectures with no radix tree paging structures?
> >
> > The mm->pgd will be the software pagetable. So suppose that do_anonymous_page is
> > doing set_ptes on the PTE table belonging to the software pagetable. We will
> > hook a "native_set_ptes" into set_ptes, which will set the ptes on a different
> > pagetable maintained by arm64 code (probably mm_context_t->native_pgd).
>
> Traditionally, you do this kind of funky manipulation in update_mmu_cache.
>
> But this is still an extremely complex and invasive change (that I assume most
> people would not like to see) with dubious benefit.
>
> > > If so, that's wildly inefficient, unless you're willing to go into reclaimable
> > > page tables on the arm64 side. And that brings extra problems and extra fun :)
> >
> > I didn't understand the reclaimable reference, but yes we need to make this efficient.
>
> I'm not talking about CPU runtime efficiency, but memory efficiency. Doing
> this makes you essentially duplicate page tables - not exactly ideal. This is
> a Known Problem in classic UNIX systems which do something similar
> (but not the same): anonymous memory pointers are stored in some intermediary
> structure (SunOS and UVM call it "amap"), and paging structures are entirely
> redundant there. They can freely tear down a page table because they can freely
> put it together from the amap and file mappings (what they call vm_object and
> we call address_space).
>
> Anyway, I'm boring you with these funny historical details so you can understand
> the similarities: the Linux page table format generally matches hardware, and
> we store anonymous memory "state" there, so you can't ever tear-down a pgtable
> without losing state of whatever was mapped there before. However, if you go
> down the "arm64 now has a separate pgtable structure", the roles switch:
> arm64's internal page table format makes for the real page tables, and linux's
> pgtable structure is nothing more than an "amap". So you could (and perhaps
> should) freely reclaim arm64 MMU page tables once memory pressure hits, because
> they are freely discardable.
>
> Does this make sense?

I've been thinking about building the 64k page tables similar to how 
HMM/KVM handles it, invalidating them through mmu notifiers etc and 
building them on demand.

Considering the 64k MMU of a process just like a special device that 
builds its own page tables.

This way, they could get reclaimed more easily and most of the core + 
arm64 page able manipulation code could be kept as is.

However, I don't know how much the performance impact of that approach 
would be.

--
Cheers,

David