linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH RFC v2 0/4] mm/ksm: add option to automerge VMAs

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Message-ID: <20190515085158.hyuamrxkxhjhx6go@butterfly.localdomain>
Date:   Wed, 15 May 2019 10:51:58 +0200
From:   Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@...hat.com>
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@...tuozzo.com>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Pavel Tatashin <pasha.tatashin@...een.com>,
        Timofey Titovets <nefelim4ag@...il.com>,
        Aaron Tomlin <atomlin@...hat.com>,
        Grzegorz Halat <ghalat@...hat.com>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-api@...r.kernel.org, Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC v2 0/4] mm/ksm: add option to automerge VMAs

On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 10:33:21AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > For my current setup with 2 Firefox instances I get 100 to 200 MiB saved
> > for the second instance depending on the amount of tabs.
> 
> What does prevent Firefox (an opensource project) to be updated to use
> the explicit merging?

This was rather an example of a big project. Other big projects may be
closed source, of course.

And yes, with regard to FF specifically I think nothing prevents it from
being modified appropriately.

> > Answering your question regarding using existing interfaces, since
> > there's only one, madvise(2), this requires modifying all the
> > applications one wants to de-duplicate. In case of containers with
> > arbitrary content or in case of binary-only apps this is pretty hard if
> > not impossible to do properly.
> 
> OK, this makes more sense. Please note that there are other people who
> would like to see certain madvise operations to be done on a remote
> process - e.g. to allow external memory management (Android would like
> to control memory aging so something like MADV_DONTNEED without loosing
> content and more probably) and potentially other madvise operations.
> Or maybe we need a completely new interface other than madvise.

I didn't know about those intentions. Could you please point me to a
relevant discussion so that I can check the details?

> In general, having a more generic API that would cover more usecases is
> definitely much more preferable than one ad-hoc API that handles a very
> specific usecase. So please try to think about a more generic

Yup, I see now. Since you are aware of ongoing intentions, please do Cc
those people then and/or let me know about previous discussions please.
That way thinking of how a new API should be implemented (be it a sysfs
file or something else) should be easier and more visible.

Thanks.

-- 
  Best regards,
    Oleksandr Natalenko (post-factum)
    Senior Software Maintenance Engineer