Re: [PATCH v4 1/5] mm/page_idle: Add per-pid idle page tracking using virtual indexing

Andrew Morton
2019-08-06T22:19:26Z

(cc Brendan's other email address, hoping for review input ;))

On Mon, 5 Aug 2019 13:04:47 -0400 "Joel Fernandes (Google)" <joel@joelfernandes.org> wrote:

> The page_idle tracking feature currently requires looking up the pagemap
> for a process followed by interacting with /sys/kernel/mm/page_idle.
> Looking up PFN from pagemap in Android devices is not supported by
> unprivileged process and requires SYS_ADMIN and gives 0 for the PFN.
>
> This patch adds support to directly interact with page_idle tracking at
> the PID level by introducing a /proc/<pid>/page_idle file. It follows
> the exact same semantics as the global /sys/kernel/mm/page_idle, but now
> looking up PFN through pagemap is not needed since the interface uses
> virtual frame numbers, and at the same time also does not require
> SYS_ADMIN.
>
> In Android, we are using this for the heap profiler (heapprofd) which
> profiles and pin points code paths which allocates and leaves memory
> idle for long periods of time. This method solves the security issue
> with userspace learning the PFN, and while at it is also shown to yield
> better results than the pagemap lookup, the theory being that the window
> where the address space can change is reduced by eliminating the
> intermediate pagemap look up stage. In virtual address indexing, the
> process's mmap_sem is held for the duration of the access.

Quite a lot of changes to the page_idle code. Has this all been
runtime tested on architectures where
CONFIG_HAVE_ARCH_PTE_SWP_PGIDLE=n? That could be x86 with a little
Kconfig fiddle-for-testing-purposes.

> 8 files changed, 376 insertions(+), 45 deletions(-)

Quite a lot of new code unconditionally added to major architectures.
Are we confident that everyone will want this feature?

>
> ...
>
> +static int proc_page_idle_open(struct inode *inode, struct file *file)
> +{
> + struct mm_struct *mm;
> +
> + mm = proc_mem_open(inode, PTRACE_MODE_READ);
> + if (IS_ERR(mm))
> + return PTR_ERR(mm);
> + file->private_data = mm;
> + return 0;
> +}
> +
> +static int proc_page_idle_release(struct inode *inode, struct file *file)
> +{
> + struct mm_struct *mm = file->private_data;
> +
> + if (mm)

I suspect the test isn't needed? proc_page_idle_release) won't be
called if proc_page_idle_open() failed?

> + mmdrop(mm);
> + return 0;
> +}
>
> ...
>