On 7/3/18 5:14 AM, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 01:34:53PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Tue 03-07-18 12:19:11, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 10:27:18AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Tue 03-07-18 11:12:05, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
On Mon, Jul 02, 2018 at 02:49:28PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Mon 02-07-18 15:33:50, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
[...]
I probably miss the explanation somewhere, but what's wrong with allowing
other thread to re-populate the VMA?
We have discussed that earlier and it boils down to how is racy access
to munmap supposed to behave. Right now we have either the original
content or SEGV. If we allow to simply madvise_dontneed before real
unmap we could get a new page as well. There might be (quite broken I
would say) user space code that would simply corrupt data silently that
way.
Okay, so we add a lot of complexity to accommodate broken userspace that
may or may not exist. Is it right? :)
I would really love to do the most simple and obious thing
diff --git a/mm/mmap.c b/mm/mmap.c
index 336bee8c4e25..86ffb179c3b5 100644
--- a/mm/mmap.c
+++ b/mm/mmap.c
@@ -2811,6 +2811,8 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL(vm_munmap);
SYSCALL_DEFINE2(munmap, unsigned long, addr, size_t, len)
{
profile_munmap(addr);
+ if (len > LARGE_NUMBER)
+ do_madvise(addr, len, MADV_DONTNEED);
return vm_munmap(addr, len);
}
but the argument that current semantic of good data or SEGV on
racing threads is no longer preserved sounds valid to me. Remember
optimizations shouldn't eat your data. How do we ensure that we won't
corrupt data silently?
+linux-api
Frankly, I don't see change in semantics here.
Code that has race between munmap() and page fault would get intermittent
SIGSEGV before and after the approach with simple MADV_DONTNEED.
prior to this patch you would either get an expected content (if you
win the race) or SEGV otherwise. With the above change you would get a
third state - a fresh new page (zero page) if you lost the race half
way. That sounds like a change of a long term semantic.
How much that matters is of course a question. Userspace is known to do
the most unexpected things you never even dreamed of.
I bet nobody would notice the difference.
Let's go the simple way. The price to protect against *theoretical* broken
userspace is too high.
That simple way has two major issues:
* The unexpected third state as Michal mentioned. VM_DEAD is a simple
way to deal with it. It may not be able to kill all corner cases, but it
should be a good simple approach to deal with the most wacky applications.
* Can't handle mlocked and hugetlb vmas mentioned by Andrew.
MADV_DONTNEED just skips them.
Actually, I think your suggestion about just calling regular do_munmap()
when getting the exclusive lock sounds reasonable. With this approach,
we can solve the above caveats and make code simple enough (Of course
not that simple as Michal expects :-)
Thanks,
Yang
