On 28.11.24 12:37, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
We are current refactoring struct page to make it smaller, removing unneeded fields that correctly belong to struct folio. Two of those fields are page->index and page->mapping. Perf is currently making use of both of these, so this patch removes this usage as it turns out it is unnecessary. Perf establishes its own internally controlled memory-mapped pages using vm_ops hooks. The first page in the mapping is the read/write user control page, and the rest of the mapping consists of read-only pages. The VMA is backed by kernel memory either from the buddy allocator or vmalloc depending on configuration. It is intended to be mapped read/write, but because it has a page_mkwrite() hook, vma_wants_writenotify() indicaets that it should be mapped read-only. When a write fault occurs, the provided page_mkwrite() hook, perf_mmap_fault() (doing double duty handing faults as well) uses the vmf->pgoff field to determine if this is the first page, allowing for the desired read/write first page, read-only rest mapping. For this to work the implementation has to carefully work around faulting logic. When a page is write-faulted, the fault() hook is called first, then its page_mkwrite() hook is called (to allow for dirty tracking in file systems). On fault we set the folio's mapping in perf_mmap_fault(), this is because when do_page_mkwrite() is subsequently invoked, it treats a missing mapping as an indicator that the fault should be retried. We also set the folio's index so, given the folio is being treated as faux user memory, it correctly references its offset within the VMA. This explains why the mapping and index fields are used - but it's not necessary. We preallocate pages when perf_mmap() is called for the first time via rb_alloc(), and further allocate auxiliary pages via rb_aux_alloc() as needed if the mapping requires it. This allocation is done in the f_ops->mmap() hook provided in perf_mmap(), and so we can instead simply map all the memory right away here - there's no point in handling (read) page faults when we don't demand page nor need to be notified about them (perf does not). This patch therefore changes this logic to map everything when the mmap() hook is called, establishing a PFN map. It implements vm_ops->pfn_mkwrite() to provide the required read/write vs. read-only behaviour, which does not require the previously implemented workarounds. It makes sense semantically to establish a PFN map too - we are managing the pages internally and so it is appropriate to mark this as a special mapping.
It's rather sad seeing more PFNMAP users where PFNMAP is not really required (-> this is struct page backed).
Especially having to perform several independent remap_pfn_range() calls rather looks like yet another workaround ...
Would we be able to achieve something comparable with vm_insert_pages(), to just map them in advance?
-- Cheers, David / dhildenb
