Re: [PATCH v4] mm: Add MREMAP_DONTUNMAP to mremap().

Andrew Morton
2020-02-10T01:21:43Z

On Fri, 7 Feb 2020 12:18:56 -0800 Brian Geffon <bgeffon@google.com> wrote:

> When remapping an anonymous, private mapping, if MREMAP_DONTUNMAP is
> set, the source mapping will not be removed. Instead it will be
> cleared as if a brand new anonymous, private mapping had been created
> atomically as part of the mremap() call.  If a userfaultfd was watching
> the source, it will continue to watch the new mapping.  For a mapping
> that is shared or not anonymous, MREMAP_DONTUNMAP will cause the
> mremap() call to fail. Because MREMAP_DONTUNMAP always results in moving
> a VMA you MUST use the MREMAP_MAYMOVE flag. The final result is two
> equally sized VMAs where the destination contains the PTEs of the source.
>
> We hope to use this in Chrome OS where with userfaultfd we could write
> an anonymous mapping to disk without having to STOP the process or worry
> about VMA permission changes.
>
> This feature also has a use case in Android, Lokesh Gidra has said
> that "As part of using userfaultfd for GC, We'll have to move the physical
> pages of the java heap to a separate location. For this purpose mremap
> will be used. Without the MREMAP_DONTUNMAP flag, when I mremap the java
> heap, its virtual mapping will be removed as well. Therefore, we'll
> require performing mmap immediately after. This is not only time consuming
> but also opens a time window where a native thread may call mmap and
> reserve the java heap's address range for its own usage. This flag
> solves the problem."

This seems useful and reasonably mature, so I'll queue it for
additional testing and shall await review feedback.

Could we please get some self-test code for this feature in
tools/testing/selftests/vm? Perhaps in userfaultfd.c?