Hi On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 6:41 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 9:36 AM, David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Hi >> >> On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 6:20 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> Can you summarize why holes can't be reliably backed by the zero page? >> >> To answer this, I will quote Hugh from "PATCH v2 1/3": >> >>> We do already use the ZERO_PAGE instead of allocating when it's a >>> simple read; and on the face of it, we could extend that to mmap >>> once the file is sealed. But I am rather afraid to do so - for >>> many years there was an mmap /dev/zero case which did that, but >>> it was an easily forgotten case which caught us out at least >>> once, so I'm reluctant to reintroduce it now for sealing. >>> >>> Anyway, I don't expect you to resolve the issue of sealed holes: >>> that's very much my territory, to give you support on. >> >> Holes can be avoided with a simple fallocate(). I don't understand why >> I should make SEAL_WRITE do the fallocate for the caller. During the >> discussion of memfd_create() I was told to drop the "size" parameter, >> because it is redundant. I don't see how this implicit fallocate() >> does not fall into the same category? >> > > I'm really confused now. > > If I SEAL_WRITE a file, and then I mmap it PROT_READ, and then I read > it, is that a "simple read"? If so, doesn't that mean that there's no > problem? I assumed Hugh was talking about read(). So no, this is not about memory-reads on mmap()ed regions. Looking at shmem_file_read_iter() I can see a ZERO_PAGE(0) call in case shmem_getpage_gfp(SGP_READ) tells us there's a hole. I cannot see anything like that in the mmap_region() and shmem_fault() paths. Thanks David -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html