On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 11:07:56AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 11:05 AM Matthew Wilcox [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Huh?  Last I checked, the fault_in_readable actually read a byte from
the page.  It has to wait for the read to complete before that can
happen.

Yeah, we don't have any kind of async fault-in model.

I'm not sure how that would even look. I don't think it would
necessarily be *impossible* (special marker in the exception table to
let the fault code know that this is a "prepare" fault), but it would
be pretty challenging.

It wouldn't be _that_ bad necessarily.  filemap_fault:

        page = find_get_page(mapping, offset);
...
        } else if (!page) {
                fpin = do_sync_mmap_readahead(vmf);

... and we could return at that point if the flag was set.  There'd be
some more details to fill in (if there's a !uptodate page in the page
cache, don't wait for it), but it might not be too bad.