linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] mm: Save soft-dirty bits on swapped pages

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Message-ID: <20130725070719.GB27992@moon>
Date:	Thu, 25 Jul 2013 11:07:19 +0400
From:	Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@...il.com>
To:	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
Cc:	Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@...allels.com>,
	James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...senpartnership.com>,
	Linux MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Matt Mackall <mpm@...enic.com>,
	Xiao Guangrong <xiaoguangrong@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@...hat.com>,
	KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@...il.com>,
	Stephen Rothwell <sfr@...b.auug.org.au>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm: Save soft-dirty bits on swapped pages

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 12:40:22PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> 
> Hmm.  So there are at least three kinds of memory:
> 
> Anonymous pages: soft-dirty works
> Shared file-backed pages: soft-dirty does not work
> Private file-backed pages: soft-dirty works (but see below)
> 
> Perhaps another bit should be allocated to expose to userspace either
> "soft-dirty", "soft-clean", or "soft-dirty unsupported"?

> There's another possible issue with private file-backed pages, though:
> how do you distinguish clean-and-not-cowed from cowed-but-soft-clean?
> (The former will reflect changes in the underlying file, I think, but
> the latter won't.)

When fault happens with cow allocation (on write) the pte get soft dirty
bit set (the code uses pte_mkdirty(entry) in __do_fault) and until we
explicitly clean the bit it remains set. Or you mean something else?
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