David, you said that you were working on some alternative model. Is it
perhaps along these same lines below?
I was thinking that a bit in the page tables to say "this page is
exclusive to this VM" would be a really simple thing to deal with for
fork() and swapout and friends.
But we don't have such a bit in general, since many architectures have
very limited sets of SW bits, and even when they exist we've spent
them on things like UDDF_WP.,
But the more I think about the "bit doesn't even have to be in the
page tables", the more I think maybe that's the solution.
A bit in the 'struct page' itself.
For hugepages, you'd have to distribute said bit when you split the hugepage.
But other than that it looks quite simple: anybody who does a virtual
copy will inevitably be messing with the page refcount, so clearing
the "exclusive ownership" bit wouldn't be costly: the 'struct page'
cacheline is already getting dirtied.
Or what was your model you were implying you were thinking about in
your other email? You said
"I might have had an idea yesterday on how to fix most of the issues
without relying on the mapcount, doing it similar [..]"
but I didn't then reply to that email because I had just written this
other long email to Nadav.
Linus
On Sun, Dec 19, 2021 at 9:27 AM Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Adding another bit in the page tables - *purely* to say "this VM owns
> the page outright" - would be fairly powerful. And fairly simple.
>
> Then any COW event will set that bit - because when you actually COW,
> the page you install is *yours*. No questions asked.
>
[ snip snip ]
>
> Btw, the extra bit doesn't really have to be in the page tables. It
> could be a bit in the page itself. We could add another page bit that
> we just clear when we do the "add ref to page as you make a virtual
> copy during fork() etc".
>
> And no, we can't use "pincount" either, because it's not exact. The
> fact that the page count is so elevated that we think it's pinned is a
> _heuristic_, and that's ok when you have the opposite problem, and ask
> "*might* this page be pinned". You want to never get a false negative,
> but it can get a false positive.
>
> Linus
