linux-kernel - Re: [RFC 0/1] memfd: Support mapping to zero page on reading

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Date:   Wed, 12 Jan 2022 04:32:34 +0000
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
To:     Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>
Cc:     Peng Liang <liangpeng10@...wei.com>,
        David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, akpm@...ux-foundation.org,
        xiexiangyou@...wei.com, zhengchuan@...wei.com,
        wanghao232@...wei.com
Subject: Re: [RFC 0/1] memfd: Support mapping to zero page on reading

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 06:30:31PM -0800, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> But I have to say that use of ZERO_PAGE for shmem/memfd/tmpfs read-fault
> might (potentially) be very welcome.  Not as some MFD_ZEROPAGE special
> case, but as how it would always work.  Deleting the shmem_recalc_inode()
> cruft, which is there to correct accounting for the unmodified read-only
> pages, after page reclaim has got around to freeing them later.
> 
> It does require more work than you gave it in 1/1: mainly, as you call
> out above, there's a need to note in the mapping's XArray when ZERO_PAGE
> has been used at an offset, and do an rmap walk to unmap those ptes when
> a writable page is substituted - see __xip_unmap() in Linux 3.19's
> mm/filemap_xip.c for such an rmap walk.

I think putting a pointer to the zero page in the XArray would introduce
some unwelcome complexity, but the XArray has a special XA_ZERO_ENTRY
which might be usable for such a thing.  It would need some careful
analysis and testing, of course, but it might also let us remove
the special cases in the DAX code for DAX_ZERO_PAGE.

I agree with you that temporarily allocating pages has worked "well
enough", but maybe some workloads would benefit; even for files on block
device filesystems, reading a hole and never writing to it may be common
enough that this is an optimisation we've been missing for many years.