linux/Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt
Cyrill Gorcunov d9104d1ca9 mm: track vma changes with VM_SOFTDIRTY bit
Pavel reported that in case if vma area get unmapped and then mapped (or
expanded) in-place, the soft dirty tracker won't be able to recognize this
situation since it works on pte level and ptes are get zapped on unmap,
loosing soft dirty bit of course.

So to resolve this situation we need to track actions on vma level, there
VM_SOFTDIRTY flag comes in.  When new vma area created (or old expanded)
we set this bit, and keep it here until application calls for clearing
soft dirty bit.

Thus when user space application track memory changes now it can detect if
vma area is renewed.

Reported-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Signed-off-by: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@openvz.org>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Cc: Xiao Guangrong <xiaoguangrong@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>
Cc: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: "Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-09-11 15:57:56 -07:00

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SOFT-DIRTY PTEs
The soft-dirty is a bit on a PTE which helps to track which pages a task
writes to. In order to do this tracking one should
1. Clear soft-dirty bits from the task's PTEs.
This is done by writing "4" into the /proc/PID/clear_refs file of the
task in question.
2. Wait some time.
3. Read soft-dirty bits from the PTEs.
This is done by reading from the /proc/PID/pagemap. The bit 55 of the
64-bit qword is the soft-dirty one. If set, the respective PTE was
written to since step 1.
Internally, to do this tracking, the writable bit is cleared from PTEs
when the soft-dirty bit is cleared. So, after this, when the task tries to
modify a page at some virtual address the #PF occurs and the kernel sets
the soft-dirty bit on the respective PTE.
Note, that although all the task's address space is marked as r/o after the
soft-dirty bits clear, the #PF-s that occur after that are processed fast.
This is so, since the pages are still mapped to physical memory, and thus all
the kernel does is finds this fact out and puts both writable and soft-dirty
bits on the PTE.
While in most cases tracking memory changes by #PF-s is more than enough
there is still a scenario when we can lose soft dirty bits -- a task
unmaps a previously mapped memory region and then maps a new one at exactly
the same place. When unmap is called, the kernel internally clears PTE values
including soft dirty bits. To notify user space application about such
memory region renewal the kernel always marks new memory regions (and
expanded regions) as soft dirty.
This feature is actively used by the checkpoint-restore project. You
can find more details about it on http://criu.org
-- Pavel Emelyanov, Apr 9, 2013