On 2/13/25 19:16, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:

The guard regions feature was initially implemented to support anonymous
mappings only, excluding shmem.

This was done such as to introduce the feature carefully and incrementally
and to be conservative when considering the various caveats and corner
cases that are applicable to file-backed mappings but not to anonymous
ones.

Now this feature has landed in 6.13, it is time to revisit this and to
extend this functionality to file-backed and shmem mappings.

In order to make this maximally useful, and since one may map file-backed
mappings read-only (for instance ELF images), we also remove the
restriction on read-only mappings and permit the establishment of guard
regions in any non-hugetlb, non-mlock()'d mapping.

Do you plan to address mlock later too? I guess somebody might find use for
those. Is there some fundamental issue or just that we need to define some
good semantics for corner cases? (i.e. if pages are already populated in the
mlocked area, discarding them by replacing with guard pte's goes against
that, so do we allow it or not?).

Otherwise nice discussion of all the potential issues here!