Avoiding allocation of unused shmem page

Matthew Wilcox
2022-10-20T20:14:20Z

In yesterday's call, David brought up the case where we fallocate a file
in shmem, call mmap(MAP_PRIVATE) and then store to a page which is over
a hole. That currently causes shmem to allocate a page, zero-fill it,
then COW it, resulting in two pages being allocated when only the
COW page really needs to be allocated.

The path we currently take through the MM when we take the page fault
looks like this (correct me if I'm wrong ...):

handle_mm_fault()
__handle_mm_fault()
handle_pte_fault()
do_fault()
do_cow_fault()
__do_fault()
vm_ops->fault()

... which is where we come into shmem_fault(). Apart from the
horrendous hole-punch handling case, shmem_fault() is quite simple:

err = shmem_get_folio_gfp(inode, vmf->pgoff, &folio, SGP_CACHE,
gfp, vma, vmf, &ret);
if (err)
return vmf_error(err);
vmf->page = folio_file_page(folio, vmf->pgoff);
return ret;

What we could do here is detect this case. Something like:

enum sgp_type sgp = SGP_CACHE;

if ((vmf->flags & FAULT_FLAG_WRITE) && !(vma->vm_flags & VM_SHARED))
sgp = SGP_READ;
err = shmem_get_folio_gfp(inode, vmf->pgoff, &folio, sgp, gfp,
vma, vmf, &ret);
if (err)
return vmf_error(err);
if (folio)
vmf->page = folio_file_page(folio, vmf->pgoff);
else
vmf->page = NULL;
return ret;

and change do_cow_fault() like this:

+++ b/mm/memory.c
@@ -4575,12 +4575,17 @@ static vm_fault_t do_cow_fault(struct vm_fault *vmf)
if (ret & VM_FAULT_DONE_COW)
return ret;

- copy_user_highpage(vmf->cow_page, vmf->page, vmf->address, vma);
+ if (vmf->page)
+ copy_user_highpage(vmf->cow_page, vmf->page, vmf->address, vma);
+ else
+ clear_user_highpage(vmf->cow_page, vmf->address);
__SetPageUptodate(vmf->cow_page);

ret |= finish_fault(vmf);
- unlock_page(vmf->page);
- put_page(vmf->page);
+ if (vmf->page) {
+ unlock_page(vmf->page);
+ put_page(vmf->page);
+ }
if (unlikely(ret & (VM_FAULT_ERROR | VM_FAULT_NOPAGE | VM_FAULT_RETRY)))
goto uncharge_out;
return ret;

... I wrote the code directly in my email client; definitely not
compile-tested. But if this situation is causing a real problem for
someone, this would be a quick fix for them.

Is this a real problem or just intellectual curiosity? Also, does
this need support for THPs being created directly, or is khugepaged
fixing it up afterwards good enough?