"Peter.Enderborg@xxxxxxxx" <Peter.Enderborg@xxxxxxxx> writes: >> >> This syscall can be used by the CRIU project and other applications which >> require soft-dirty PTE bit information. The following operations are >> supported in this syscall: >> - Get the pages that are soft-dirty. >> - Clear the pages which are soft-dirty. >> - The optional flag to ignore the VM_SOFTDIRTY and only track per page >> soft-dirty PTE bit >> Hi Peter, (For context, I wrote a previous version of this patch and have been working with Usama on the current patch). > Why can it not be done as a IOCTL? Considering an ioctl is basically a namespaced syscall with extra-steps, surely we can do it :) There are a few reasons we haven't, though: 1) ioctl auditing/controling is much harder than syscall 2) There is a concern for performance, since this might be executed frequently by windows applications running over wine. There is an extra cost with unnecessary copy_[from/to]_user that we wanted to avoid, even though we haven't measured. 3) I originally wrote this at the time process_memadvise was merged. I felt it fits the same kind of interface exposed by process_memadvise/process_mrelease, recently merged. 4) Not obvious whether the ioctl would be against pagemap/clear_refs. Neither file name describes both input and output semantics. Obviously, all of those reasons can be worked around, and we can turn this into an ioctl. Thanks, -- Gabriel Krisman Bertazi
