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From: Ayaan Mirza Baig <ayaanmirzabaig85@gmail.com>
To: akpm@linux-foundation.org
Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org, david@redhat.com
Subject: [RFC] mm: Add MADV_NONZERO to skip redundant zeroing in MADV_DONTNEED
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2025 06:31:59 +0530	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <ed44f504-64a5-4c64-ba99-7533e027e4c1@gmail.com> (raw)

Hi Andrew,

I've been looking at MADV_DONTNEED and noticed we always zero pages, 
even when
it might not be necessary for cases like:

- Media buffers (video/audio processing)
- Temporary compute workloads
- Pre-zeroed memory pools

This causes measurable overhead - in some synthetic tests I'm seeing 
~40% extra
latency from the zeroing. I'm thinking of adding a MADV_NONZERO flag 
that would
let us skip the zeroing when:

1. It's explicitly requested (MADV_DONTNEED|MADV_NONZERO)
2. We're confident it's safe (VM_IO, VM_HUGETLB, etc)
3. The user has explicitly marked the region as non-sensitive

Before I go deeper on patches, I wanted to check:
- Does this sound reasonable?
- Any obvious security holes I'm missing?
- Would you prefer a new flag or a separate advice type?

Early prototype numbers look promising, but I want to make sure I'm not 
missing
something fundamental. If the concept seems viable, I'll work up proper 
benchmarks
and formal patches.

Thanks for your time!
- Ayaan Mirza Baig


             reply	other threads:[~2025-06-04  1:02 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2025-06-04  1:01 Ayaan Mirza Baig [this message]
2025-06-04  1:49 ` [RFC] mm: Add MADV_NONZERO to skip redundant zeroing in MADV_DONTNEED Harry Yoo
2025-06-04 11:27   ` David Hildenbrand

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