Linus Torvalds wrote on Thu, Jan 10, 2019: > So right now, I consider the mincore change to be a "try to probe the > state of mincore users", and we haven't really gotten a lot of > information back yet. <raises hand> For Netflix, losing accurate information from the mincore syscall would lengthen database cluster maintenance operations from days to months. We rely on cross-process mincore to migrate the contents of a page cache from machine to machine, and across reboots. To do this, I wrote and maintain happycache [1], a page cache dumper/loader tool. It is quite similar in architecture to pgfincore, except that it is agnostic to workload. The gist of happycache's operation is "produce a dump of residence status for each page, do some operation, then reload exactly the same pages which were present before." happycache is entirely dependent on accurate reporting of the in-core status of file-backed pages, as accessed by another process. We primarily use happycache with Cassandra, which (like Postgres + pgfincore) relies heavily on OS page cache to reduce disk accesses. Because our workloads never experience a cold page cache, we are able to provision hardware for a peak utilization level that is far lower than the hypothetical "every query is a cache miss" peak. A database warmed by happycache can be ready for service in seconds (bounded only by the performance of the drives and the I/O subsystem), with no period of in-service degradation. By contrast, putting a database in service without a page cache entails a potentially unbounded period of degradation (at Netflix, the time to populate a single node's cache via natural cache misses varies by workload from hours to weeks). If a single node upgrade were to take weeks, then upgrading an entire cluster would take months. Since we want to apply security upgrades (and other things) on a somewhat tighter schedule, we would have to develop more complex solutions to provide the same functionality already provided by mincore. At the bottom line, happycache is designed to benignly exploit the same information leak documented in the paper [2]. I think it makes perfect sense to remove cross-process mincore functionality from unprivileged users, but not to remove it entirely. Josh Snyder Netflix Cloud Database Engineering [1] https://github.com/hashbrowncipher/happycache [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01161
