On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 12:44 AM David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > I'm still evaluating the proposal to use memfds but I'm not sure if
> > the issue that David Hildenbrand mentioned about additional memory
> > consumed in pagecache (which has to be addressed) is the only one we
> > will encounter with this approach. If anyone knows of any potential
> > issues with using memfds as named anonymous memory, I would really
> > appreciate your feedback before I go too far in that direction.
>
> [MAP_PRIVATE memfd only behave that way with 4k, not with huge pages, so
> I think it just has to be fixed. It doesn't make any sense to allocate a
> page for the pagecache ("populate the file") when accessing via a
> private mapping that's supposed to leave the file untouched]
>
> My gut feeling is if you really need a string as identifier, then try
> going with memfds. Yes, we might hit some road blocks to be sorted out,
> but it just logically makes sense to me: Files have names. These names
> exist before mapping and after mapping. They "name" the content.
I'm investigating this direction. I don't have much background with
memfds, so I'll need to digest the code first.
>
> Maybe it's just me, but the whole interface, setting the name via a
> prctl after the mapping was already instantiated doesn't really spark
> joy at my end. That's not a strong pushback, but if we can avoid it
> using something that's already there, that would be very much preferred.
Actually that's one of my worries about using memfds. There might be
cases when we need to name a vma after it was mapped. memfd_create()
would not allow us to do that AFAIKT. But I need to check all usages
to say if that's really an issue.
Thanks!
>
> --
> Thanks,
>
> David / dhildenb
>
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