On Mon 08-02-21 23:26:05, Mike Rapoport wrote:

On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 11:49:22AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:

quoted

On Mon 08-02-21 10:49:17, Mike Rapoport wrote:

[...]

quoted

quoted

The file descriptor based memory has several advantages over the
"traditional" mm interfaces, such as mlock(), mprotect(), madvise(). It
paves the way for VMMs to remove the secret memory range from the process;

I do not understand how it helps to remove the memory from the process
as the interface explicitly allows to add a memory that is removed from
all other processes via direct map.

The current implementation does not help to remove the memory from the
process, but using fd-backed memory seems a better interface to remove
guest memory from host mappings than mmap. As Andy nicely put it:

"Getting fd-backed memory into a guest will take some possibly major work in
the kernel, but getting vma-backed memory into a guest without mapping it
in the host user address space seems much, much worse."

OK, so IIUC this means that the model is to hand over memory from host
to guest. I thought the guest would be under control of its address
space and therefore it operates on the VMAs. This would benefit from
an additional and more specific clarification.

quoted

quoted

As secret memory implementation is not an extension of tmpfs or hugetlbfs,
usage of a dedicated system call rather than hooking new functionality into
memfd_create(2) emphasises that memfd_secret(2) has different semantics and
allows better upwards compatibility.

What is this supposed to mean? What are differences?

Well, the phrasing could be better indeed. That supposed to mean that
they differ in the semantics behind the file descriptor: memfd_create
implements sealing for shmem and hugetlbfs while memfd_secret implements
memory hidden from the kernel.

Right but why memfd_create model is not sufficient for the usecase?
Please note that I am arguing against. To be honest I do not really care
much. Using an existing scheme is usually preferable from my POV but
there might be real reasons why shmem as a backing "storage" is not
appropriate.
  

quoted

quoted

The secretmem mappings are locked in memory so they cannot exceed
RLIMIT_MEMLOCK. Since these mappings are already locked an attempt to
mlock() secretmem range would fail and mlockall() will ignore secretmem
mappings.

What about munlock?

Isn't this implied? ;-)

My bad here. I thought that munlock fails on vmas which are not mlocked
and I was curious about the behavior when mlockall() is followed by
munlock. But I do not see this being the case. So this should be ok.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs