linux-kernel - Re: [RFC v4][PATCH 4/9] Memory management (dump)

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Message-Id: <1221065728.6781.19.camel@nimitz>
Date:	Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:55:28 -0700
From:	Dave Hansen <dave@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:	Oren Laadan <orenl@...columbia.edu>
Cc:	containers@...ts.linux-foundation.org, jeremy@...p.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, arnd@...db.de
Subject: Re: [RFC v4][PATCH 4/9] Memory management (dump)

On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 03:42 -0400, Oren Laadan wrote:
> +       while (addr < end) {
> +               struct page *page;
> +
> +               /*
> +                * simplified version of get_user_pages(): already have vma,
> +                * only need FOLL_TOUCH, and (for now) ignore fault stats.
> +                *
> +                * FIXME: consolidate with get_user_pages()
> +                */
> +
> +               cond_resched();
> +               while (!(page = follow_page(vma, addr, FOLL_TOUCH))) {
> +                       ret = handle_mm_fault(vma->vm_mm, vma, addr, 0);
> +                       if (ret & VM_FAULT_ERROR) {
> +                               if (ret & VM_FAULT_OOM)
> +                                       ret = -ENOMEM;
> +                               else if (ret & VM_FAULT_SIGBUS)
> +                                       ret = -EFAULT;
> +                               else
> +                                       BUG();
> +                               break;
> +                       }
> +                       cond_resched();
> +                       ret = 0;
> +               }

get_user_pages() is really the wrong thing to use here.  It makes pages
*present* so that we can do things like hand them off to a driver.  For
checkpointing, we really don't care about that.  It's a waste of time,
for instance to perform faults to fill the mappings up with zero pages
and page tables.  Just think of what will happen the first time we touch
a very large, very sparse anonymous area.  We'll probably kill the
system just allocating page tables.  Take a look at the comment in
follow_page().  This is a similar operation to core dumping, and we need
to be careful.

This might be fine for a proof of concept, but it needs to be thought
out much more thoroughly before getting merged.  I guess I'm
volunteering to go do that.

-- Dave

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