linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] SKSM: Synchronous Kernel Samepage Merging

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Message-ID: <e14516c2-bd7c-4bf1-b2af-314d23d8f59a@efficios.com>
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2025 10:44:22 -0500
From: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@...icios.com>
To: Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
 Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
 Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>, Olivier Dion <odion@...icios.com>,
 linux-mm@...ck.org
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] SKSM: Synchronous Kernel Samepage Merging

On 2025-02-28 17:32, Peter Xu wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 12:53:02PM -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
>> On 2025-02-28 11:32, Peter Xu wrote:
>>> On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 09:59:00AM -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
>>>> For the VM use-case, I wonder if we could just add a userfaultfd
>>>> "COW" event that would notify userspace when a COW happens ?
>>>
>>> I don't know what's the best for KSM and how well this will work, but we
>>> have such event for years..  See UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_WP:
>>>
>>> https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/userfaultfd.2.html
>>
>> userfaultfd UFFDIO_REGISTER only seems to work if I pass an address
>> resulting from a mmap mapping, but returns EINVAL if I pass a
>> page-aligned address which sits within a private file mapping
>> (e.g. executable data).
> 
> Yes, so far sync traps only supports RAM-based file systems, or anonymous.
> Generic private file mappings (that stores executables and libraries) are
> not yet supported.

OK, this confirms my observations.

> 
>>
>> Also, I notice that do_wp_page() only calls handle_userfault
>> VM_UFFD_WP when vm_fault flags does not have FAULT_FLAG_UNSHARE
>> set.
> 
> AFAICT that's expected, unshare should only be set on reads, never writes.
> So uffd-wp shouldn't trap any of those.

I'm confused by your comment. I thought unshare only applies to
*write* faults. What am I missing ?

> 
>>
>> AFAIU, as it stands now userfaultfd would not help tracking COW faults
>> caused by stores to private file mappings. Am I missing something ?
> 
> I think you're right.  So we have UFFD_FEATURE_WP_ASYNC that should work on
> most mappings.  That one is async, though, so more like soft-dirty.  It
> might be doable to try making it sync too without a lot of changes based on
> how async tracking works.

I'll try this out. It may not matter that it's async given a use-case
use-cases of tracking the age since the WP fault on the COW pages. We
don't need to react to the event in-place to alter its behavior, just
a notification should be fine AFAIU.

Thanks,

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
https://www.efficios.com