Date:   Mon, 11 Jan 2021 16:13:41 -0800
From:   Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@...cle.com>
To:     Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com>
Cc:     Axel Rasmussen <axelrasmussen@...gle.com>,
        Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@...il.com>,
        Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@....com>,
        Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>,
        Chinwen Chang <chinwen.chang@...iatek.com>,
        Huang Ying <ying.huang@...el.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>, Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com>,
        Jerome Glisse <jglisse@...hat.com>,
        Lokesh Gidra <lokeshgidra@...gle.com>,
        "Matthew Wilcox (Oracle)" <willy@...radead.org>,
        Michael Ellerman <mpe@...erman.id.au>,
        Michal Koutný <mkoutny@...e.com>,
        Michel Lespinasse <walken@...gle.com>,
        Mike Rapoport <rppt@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@...il.com>, Shaohua Li <shli@...com>,
        Shawn Anastasio <shawn@...stas.io>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
        Steven Price <steven.price@....com>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        Adam Ruprecht <ruprecht@...gle.com>,
        Cannon Matthews <cannonmatthews@...gle.com>,
        "Dr . David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@...hat.com>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
        Oliver Upton <oupton@...gle.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] userfaultfd: handle minor faults, add
 UFFDIO_CONTINUE

On 1/11/21 3:08 PM, Peter Xu wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 02:42:48PM -0800, Mike Kravetz wrote:
>> On 1/7/21 11:04 AM, Axel Rasmussen wrote:
>>> Overview
>>> ========
>>>
>>> This series adds a new userfaultfd registration mode,
>>> UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_MINOR. This allows userspace to intercept "minor" faults.
>>> By "minor" fault, I mean the following situation:
>>>
>>> Let there exist two mappings (i.e., VMAs) to the same page(s) (shared memory).
>>> One of the mappings is registered with userfaultfd (in minor mode), and the
>>> other is not. Via the non-UFFD mapping, the underlying pages have already been
>>> allocated & filled with some contents. The UFFD mapping has not yet been
>>> faulted in; when it is touched for the first time, this results in what I'm
>>> calling a "minor" fault. As a concrete example, when working with hugetlbfs, we
>>> have huge_pte_none(), but find_lock_page() finds an existing page.
>>>
>>> We also add a new ioctl to resolve such faults: UFFDIO_CONTINUE. The idea is,
>>> userspace resolves the fault by either a) doing nothing if the contents are
>>> already correct, or b) updating the underlying contents using the second,
>>> non-UFFD mapping (via memcpy/memset or similar, or something fancier like RDMA,
>>> or etc...). In either case, userspace issues UFFDIO_CONTINUE to tell the kernel
>>> "I have ensured the page contents are correct, carry on setting up the mapping".
>>>
>>
>> One quick thought.
>>
>> This is not going to work as expected with hugetlbfs pmd sharing.  If you
>> are not familiar with hugetlbfs pmd sharing, you are not alone. :)
>>
>> pmd sharing is enabled for x86 and arm64 architectures.  If there are multiple
>> shared mappings of the same underlying hugetlbfs file or shared memory segment
>> that are 'suitably aligned', then the PMD pages associated with those regions
>> are shared by all the mappings.  Suitably aligned means 'on a 1GB boundary'
>> and 1GB in size.
>>
>> When pmds are shared, your mappings will never see a 'minor fault'.  This
>> is because the PMD (page table entries) is shared.
> 
> Thanks for raising this, Mike.
> 
> I've got a few patches that plan to disable huge pmd sharing for uffd in
> general, e.g.:
> 
> https://github.com/xzpeter/linux/commit/f9123e803d9bdd91bf6ef23b028087676bed1540
> https://github.com/xzpeter/linux/commit/aa9aeb5c4222a2fdb48793cdbc22902288454a31
> 
> I believe we don't want that for missing mode too, but it's just not extremely
> important for missing mode yet, because in missing mode we normally monitor all
> the processes that will be using the registered mm range.  For example, in QEMU
> postcopy migration with vhost-user hugetlbfs files as backends, we'll monitor
> both the QEMU process and the DPDK program, so that either of the programs will
> trigger a missing fault even if pmd shared between them.  However again I think
> it's not ideal since uffd (even if missing mode) is pgtable-based, so sharing
> could always be too tricky.
> 
> They're not yet posted to public yet since that's part of uffd-wp support for
> hugetlbfs (along with shmem).  So just raise this up to avoid potential
> duplicated work before I post the patchset.
> 
> (Will read into details soon; probably too many things piled up...)

Thanks for the heads up about this Peter.

I know Oracle DB really wants shared pmds -and- UFFD.  I need to get details
of their exact usage model.  I know they primarily use SIGBUS, but use
MISSING_HUGETLBFS as well.  We may need to be more selective in when to
disable.

-- 
Mike Kravetz

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