On 08/26/2015 08:24 PM, Eric B Munson wrote:

The cost of faulting in all memory to be locked can be very high when
working with large mappings.  If only portions of the mapping will be
used this can incur a high penalty for locking.

For the example of a large file, this is the usage pattern for a large
statical language model (probably applies to other statical or graphical
models as well).  For the security example, any application transacting
in data that cannot be swapped out (credit card data, medical records,
etc).

This patch introduces the ability to request that pages are not
pre-faulted, but are placed on the unevictable LRU when they are finally
faulted in.  The VM_LOCKONFAULT flag will be used together with
VM_LOCKED and has no effect when set without VM_LOCKED.  Setting the
VM_LOCKONFAULT flag for a VMA will cause pages faulted into that VMA to
be added to the unevictable LRU when they are faulted or if they are
already present, but will not cause any missing pages to be faulted in.

Exposing this new lock state means that we cannot overload the meaning
of the FOLL_POPULATE flag any longer.  Prior to this patch it was used
to mean that the VMA for a fault was locked.  This means we need the
new FOLL_MLOCK flag to communicate the locked state of a VMA.
FOLL_POPULATE will now only control if the VMA should be populated and
in the case of VM_LOCKONFAULT, it will not be set.

Signed-off-by: Eric B Munson <redacted>
Cc: Michal Hocko <redacted>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <redacted>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <redacted>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org
Cc: linux-api@vger.kernel.org

Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <redacted>

I just wonder if the call to populate_vma_page_range from mprotect_fixup 
is just an potentially expensive no-op for VM_LOCKONFAULT vma's? It 
might find many cow candidates but faultin_page() won't do anything. And 
it shouldn't find any existing pages to put on the unevictable list from 
this context.

But it's a corner case and preventing it would mean putting in another 
VM_LOCKONFAULT check so maybe we can leave it like this.
-

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