On Thu, Dec 2, 2021 at 2:51 AM Charan Teja Reddy <quic_charante@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > From: Charan Teja Reddy <charante@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > > Currently fadvise(2) is supported only for the files that doesn't > associated with noop_backing_dev_info thus for the files, like shmem, > fadvise results into NOP. But then there is file_operations->fadvise() > that lets the file systems to implement their own fadvise > implementation. Use this support to implement some of the POSIX_FADV_XXX > functionality for shmem files. > > This patch aims to implement POSIX_FADV_WILLNEED and POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED > advices to shmem files which can be helpful for the drivers who may want > to manage the shmem pages of the files that are created through > shmem_file_setup[_with_mnt](). An example usecase may be like, driver > can create the shmem file of the size equal to its requirements and > map the pages for DMA and then pass the fd to user. The user who knows > well about the usage of these pages can now decide when these pages are > not required push them to swap through DONTNEED thus free up memory well > in advance rather than relying on the reclaim and use WILLNEED when it > decide that they are useful in the near future. IOW, it lets the clients > to free up/read the memory when it wants to. Another usecase is that GEM > objets which are currenlty allocated and managed through shmem files can > use vfs_fadvise(DONT|WILLNEED) on shmem fd when the driver comes to > know(like through some hints from user space) that GEM objects are not > going to use/will need in the near future. The proposed semantics of POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED is actually similar to MADV_PAGEOUT and different from MADV_DONTNEED. This is a user facing API and this difference will cause confusion.
