linux-kernel - [PATCH NOTFORMERGE 5/5] mm/madvise: allow KSM hints for remote API

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Date:   Sun, 16 Jun 2019 10:58:35 +0200
From:   Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@...hat.com>
To:     Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-api@...r.kernel.org
Subject: [PATCH NOTFORMERGE 5/5] mm/madvise: allow KSM hints for remote API

It all began with the fact that KSM works only on memory that is marked
by madvise(). And the only way to get around that is to either:

  * use LD_PRELOAD; or
  * patch the kernel with something like UKSM or PKSM.

(i skip ptrace can of worms here intentionally)

To overcome this restriction, lets employ a new remote madvise API. This
can be used by some small userspace helper daemon that will do auto-KSM
job for us.

I think of two major consumers of remote KSM hints:

  * hosts, that run containers, especially similar ones and especially in
    a trusted environment, sharing the same runtime like Node.js;

  * heavy applications, that can be run in multiple instances, not
    limited to opensource ones like Firefox, but also those that cannot be
    modified since they are binary-only and, maybe, statically linked.

Speaking of statistics, more numbers can be found in the very first
submission, that is related to this one [1]. For my current setup with
two Firefox instances I get 100 to 200 MiB saved for the second instance
depending on the amount of tabs.

1 FF instance with 15 tabs:

   $ echo "$(cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_sharing) * 4 / 1024" | bc
   410

2 FF instances, second one has 12 tabs (all the tabs are different):

   $ echo "$(cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_sharing) * 4 / 1024" | bc
   592

At the very moment I do not have specific numbers for containerised
workload, but those should be comparable in case the containers share
similar/same runtime.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/patch/1012142/

Signed-off-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@...hat.com>
---
 mm/madvise.c | 2 ++
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/madvise.c b/mm/madvise.c
index 84f899b1b6da..e8f9c49794a3 100644
--- a/mm/madvise.c
+++ b/mm/madvise.c
@@ -991,6 +991,8 @@ process_madvise_behavior_valid(int behavior)
 	switch (behavior) {
 	case MADV_COLD:
 	case MADV_PAGEOUT:
+	case MADV_MERGEABLE:
+	case MADV_UNMERGEABLE:
 		return true;

 	default:
-- 
2.22.0