Re: [PATCH v5 24/26] mm/pagemap: Recognize uffd-wp bit for shmem/hugetlbfs

Peter Xu
2021-07-21T22:57:07Z

On Wed, Jul 21, 2021 at 06:28:03PM -0400, Peter Xu wrote:
> Hi, Ivan,
>
> On Wed, Jul 21, 2021 at 07:54:44PM +0000, Ivan Teterevkov wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 21, 2021 4:20 PM +0000, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > > On 21.07.21 16:38, Ivan Teterevkov wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 5:56 PM +0000, Peter Xu wrote:
> > > >> I'm also curious what would be the real use to have an accurate
> > > >> PM_SWAP accounting. To me current implementation may not provide
> > > >> accurate value but should be good enough for most cases. However not
> > > >> sure whether it's also true for your use case.
> > > >
> > > > We want the PM_SWAP bit implemented (for shared memory in the pagemap
> > > > interface) to enhance the live migration for some fraction of the
> > > > guest VMs that have their pages swapped out to the host swap. Once
> > > > those pages are paged in and transferred over network, we then want to
> > > > release them with madvise(MADV_PAGEOUT) and preserve the working set
> > > > of the guest VMs to reduce the thrashing of the host swap.
> > >
> > > There are 3 possibilities I think (swap is just another variant of the page cache):
> > >
> > > 1) The page is not in the page cache, e.g., it resides on disk or in a swap file.
> > > pte_none().
> > > 2) The page is in the page cache and is not mapped into the page table.
> > > pte_none().
> > > 3) The page is in the page cache and mapped into the page table.
> > > !pte_none().
> > >
> > > Do I understand correctly that you want to identify 1) and indicate it via
> > > PM_SWAP?
> >
> > Yes, and I also want to outline the context so we're on the same page.
> >
> > This series introduces the support for userfaultfd-wp for shared memory
> > because once a shared page is swapped, its PTE is cleared. Upon retrieval
> > from a swap file, there's no way to "recover" the _PAGE_SWP_UFFD_WP flag
> > because unlike private memory it's not kept in PTE or elsewhere.
> >
> > We came across the same issue with PM_SWAP in the pagemap interface, but
> > fortunately, there's the place that we could query: the i_pages field of
> > the struct address_space (XArray). In https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/7/14/595
> > we do it similarly to what shmem_fault() does when it handles #PF.
> >
> > Now, in the context of this series, we were exploring whether it makes
> > any practical sense to introduce more brand new flags to the special
> > PTE to populate the pagemap flags "on the spot" from the given PTE.
> >
> > However, I can't see how (and why) to achieve that specifically for
> > PM_SWAP even with an extra bit: the XArray is precisely what we need for
> > the live migration use case. Another flag PM_SOFT_DIRTY suffers the same
> > problem as UFFD_WP_SWP_PTE_SPECIAL before this patch series, but we don't
> > need it at the moment.
> >
> > Hope that clarification makes sense?
>
> Yes it helps, thanks.
>
> So I can understand now on how that patch comes initially, even if it may not
> work for PM_SOFT_DIRTY but it seems working indeed for PM_SWAP.
>
> However I have a concern that I raised also in the other thread: I think
> there'll be an extra and meaningless xa_load() for all the real pte_none()s
> that aren't swapped out but just having no page at the back from the very
> beginning. That happens much more frequent when the memory being observed by
> pagemap is mapped in a huge chunk and sparsely mapped.
>
> With old code we'll simply skip those ptes, but now I have no idea how much
> overhead would a xa_load() brings.
>
> Btw, I think there's a way to implement such an idea similar to the swap
> special uffd-wp pte - when page reclaim of shmem pages, instead of putting a
> none pte there maybe we can also have one bit set in the none pte showing that
> this pte is swapped out. When the page faulted back we just drop that bit.
>
> That bit could be also scanned by pagemap code to know that this page was
> swapped out. That should be much lighter than xa_load(), and that identifies
> immediately from a real none pte just by reading the value.
>
> Do you think this would work?

Btw, I think that's what Tiberiu used to mention, but I think I just changed my
mind.. Sorry to have brought such a confusion.

So what I think now is: we can set it (instead of zeroing the pte) right at
unmapping the pte of page reclaim. Code-wise, that can be a special flag
(maybe, TTU_PAGEOUT?) passed over to try_to_unmap() of shrink_page_list() to
differenciate from other try_to_unmap()s.

I think that bit can also be dropped correctly e.g. when punching a hole in the
file, then rmap_walk() can find and drop the marker (I used to suspect uffd-wp
bit could get left-overs, but after a second thought here similarly, it seems
it won't; as long as hole punching and vma unmapping will always be able to
scan those marker ptes, then it seems all right to drop them correctly).

But that's my wild thoughts; I could have missed something too.

Thanks,

--
Peter Xu