Commit Graph

2 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Andrea Arcangeli
a9b85f9415 userfaultfd: change the read API to return a uffd_msg
I had requests to return the full address (not the page aligned one) to
userland.

It's not entirely clear how the page offset could be relevant because
userfaults aren't like SIGBUS that can sigjump to a different place and it
actually skip resolving the fault depending on a page offset.  There's
currently no real way to skip the fault especially because after a
UFFDIO_COPY|ZEROPAGE, the fault is optimized to be retried within the
kernel without having to return to userland first (not even self modifying
code replacing the .text that touched the faulting address would prevent
the fault to be repeated).  Userland cannot skip repeating the fault even
more so if the fault was triggered by a KVM secondary page fault or any
get_user_pages or any copy-user inside some syscall which will return to
kernel code.  The second time FAULT_FLAG_RETRY_NOWAIT won't be set leading
to a SIGBUS being raised because the userfault can't wait if it cannot
release the mmap_map first (and FAULT_FLAG_RETRY_NOWAIT is required for
that).

Still returning userland a proper structure during the read() on the uffd,
can allow to use the current UFFD_API for the future non-cooperative
extensions too and it looks cleaner as well.  Once we get additional
fields there's no point to return the fault address page aligned anymore
to reuse the bits below PAGE_SHIFT.

The only downside is that the read() syscall will read 32bytes instead of
8bytes but that's not going to be measurable overhead.

The total number of new events that can be extended or of new future bits
for already shipped events, is limited to 64 by the features field of the
uffdio_api structure.  If more will be needed a bump of UFFD_API will be
required.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: use __packed]
Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Cc: Sanidhya Kashyap <sanidhya.gatech@gmail.com>
Cc: zhang.zhanghailiang@huawei.com
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla <andreslc@google.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Peter Feiner <pfeiner@google.com>
Cc: "Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: "Huangpeng (Peter)" <peter.huangpeng@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2015-09-04 16:54:41 -07:00
Andrea Arcangeli
25edd8bffd userfaultfd: linux/Documentation/vm/userfaultfd.txt
This is the latest userfaultfd patchset.  The postcopy live migration
feature on the qemu side is mostly ready to be merged and it entirely
depends on the userfaultfd syscall to be merged as well.  So it'd be great
if this patchset could be reviewed for merging in -mm.

Userfaults allow to implement on demand paging from userland and more
generally they allow userland to more efficiently take control of the
behavior of page faults than what was available before (PROT_NONE +
SIGSEGV trap).

The use cases are:

1) KVM postcopy live migration (one form of cloud memory
   externalization).

   KVM postcopy live migration is the primary driver of this work:

    http://blog.zhaw.ch/icclab/setting-up-post-copy-live-migration-in-openstack/
    http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2015-02/msg04873.html

2) postcopy live migration of binaries inside linux containers:

    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/132662

3) KVM postcopy live snapshotting (allowing to limit/throttle the
   memory usage, unlike fork would, plus the avoidance of fork
   overhead in the first place).

   While the wrprotect tracking is not implemented yet, the syscall API is
   already contemplating the wrprotect fault tracking and it's generic enough
   to allow its later implementation in a backwards compatible fashion.

4) KVM userfaults on shared memory. The UFFDIO_COPY lowlevel method
   should be extended to work also on tmpfs and then the
   uffdio_register.ioctls will notify userland that UFFDIO_COPY is
   available even when the registered virtual memory range is tmpfs
   backed.

5) alternate mechanism to notify web browsers or apps on embedded
   devices that volatile pages have been reclaimed. This basically
   avoids the need to run a syscall before the app can access with the
   CPU the virtual regions marked volatile. This depends on point 4)
   to be fulfilled first, as volatile pages happily apply to tmpfs.

Even though there wasn't a real use case requesting it yet, it also
allows to implement distributed shared memory in a way that readonly
shared mappings can exist simultaneously in different hosts and they
can be become exclusive at the first wrprotect fault.

This patch (of 22):

Add documentation.

Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Cc: Sanidhya Kashyap <sanidhya.gatech@gmail.com>
Cc: zhang.zhanghailiang@huawei.com
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla <andreslc@google.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Peter Feiner <pfeiner@google.com>
Cc: "Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: "Huangpeng (Peter)" <peter.huangpeng@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2015-09-04 16:54:41 -07:00