On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 12:18:58PM -0700, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:

While forking a process with high number (64K) of named anonymous vmas the
overhead caused by strdup() is noticeable. Experiments with ARM64 Android
device show up to 40% performance regression when forking a process with
64k unpopulated anonymous vmas using the max name lengths vs the same
process with the same number of anonymous vmas having no name.
Introduce anon_vma_name refcounted structure to avoid the overhead of
copying vma names during fork() and when splitting named anonymous vmas.
When a vma is duplicated, instead of copying the name we increment the
refcount of this structure. Multiple vmas can point to the same
anon_vma_name as long as they increment the refcount. The name member of
anon_vma_name structure is assigned at structure allocation time and is
never changed. If vma name changes then the refcount of the original
structure is dropped, a new anon_vma_name structure is allocated
to hold the new name and the vma pointer is updated to point to the new
structure.
With this approach the fork() performance regressions is reduced 3-4x
times and with usecases using more reasonable number of VMAs (a few
thousand) the regressions is not measurable.

I like the refcounting; thank you!

Since patch2 adds a lot of things that are changed by patch3; maybe
combine them?

-- 
Kees Cook