On Wed, Aug 27, 2025 at 05:03:55PM +0200, Pratyush Yadav wrote:

I think we need something a luo_xarray data structure that users like
memfd (and later hugetlb and guest_memfd and maybe others) can build to
make serialization easier. It will cover both contiguous arrays and
arrays with some holes in them.

I'm not sure xarray is the right way to go, it is very complex data
structure and building a kho variation of it seems like it is a huge
amount of work.

I'd stick with simple kvalloc type approaches until we really run into
trouble.

You can always map a sparse xarray into a kvalloc linear list by
including the xarray index in each entry.

Especially for memfd where we don't actually expect any sparsity in
real uses cases there is no reason to invest a huge effort to optimize
for it..

As I explained above, the versioning is already there. Beyond that, why
do you think a raw C struct is better than FDT? It is just another way
of expressing the same information. FDT is a bit more cumbersome to
write and read, but comes at the benefit of more introspect-ability.

Doesn't have the size limitations, is easier to work list, runs
faster.

quoted

 luo_store_object(&memfd_luo_v0, sizeof(memfd_luo_v0), <.. identifier for this fd..>, /*version=*/0);
 luo_store_object(&memfd_luo_v1, sizeof(memfd_luo_v1), <.. identifier for this fd..>, /*version=*/1);

I think what you describe here is essentially how LUO works currently,
just that the mechanisms are a bit different.

The bit different is a very important bit though :)

The versioning should be first class, not hidden away as some emergent
property of registering multiple serializers or something like that.

Jason