Re: [PATCH v6 1/2] mm: Add MREMAP_DONTUNMAP to mremap().

On Tue, 18 Feb 2020 09:32:20 -0800 Brian Geffon [off-list ref] wrote:

When remapping an anonymous, private mapping, if MREMAP_DONTUNMAP is
set, the source mapping will not be removed. The remap operation
will be performed as it would have been normally by moving over the
page tables to the new mapping. The old vma will have any locked
flags cleared, have no pagetables, and any userfaultfds that were
watching that range will continue watching it.

For a mapping that is shared or not anonymous, MREMAP_DONTUNMAP will cause
the mremap() call to fail. Because MREMAP_DONTUNMAP always results in moving
a VMA you MUST use the MREMAP_MAYMOVE flag. The final result is two
equally sized VMAs where the destination contains the PTEs of the source.

We hope to use this in Chrome OS where with userfaultfd we could write
an anonymous mapping to disk without having to STOP the process or worry
about VMA permission changes.

This feature also has a use case in Android, Lokesh Gidra has said
that "As part of using userfaultfd for GC, We'll have to move the physical
pages of the java heap to a separate location. For this purpose mremap
will be used. Without the MREMAP_DONTUNMAP flag, when I mremap the java
heap, its virtual mapping will be removed as well. Therefore, we'll
require performing mmap immediately after. This is not only time consuming
but also opens a time window where a native thread may call mmap and
reserve the java heap's address range for its own usage. This flag
solves the problem."

Thanks.

We're a bit thin on review activity on this one.  Has Lokesh been able
to review and preferably test the code?  Are you able to identify other
potential users?  perhaps even glibc?