Re: [RFC][PATCH] uprobe: support for private hugetlb mappings

Guillaume Morin
2024-04-22T20:53:27Z

On 22 Apr 20:59, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > The benefit - to me - is very clear. People do use hugetlb mappings to
> > run code in production environments. The perf benefits are there for some
> > workloads. Intel has published a whitepaper about it etc.
> > Uprobes are a very good tool to do live tracing. If you can restart the
> > process and reproduce, you should be able to disable hugetlb remapping
> > but if you need to look at a live process, there are not many options.
> > Not being able to use uprobes is crippling.
>
> Please add all that as motivation to the patch description or cover letter.
>
> > > Yes, libhugetlbfs exists. But why do we have to support uprobes with it?
> > > Nobody cared until now, why care now?
> >
> > I think you could ask the same question for every new feature patch :)
>
> I have to, because it usually indicates a lack of motivation in the
> cover-letter/patch description :P

My cover letter was indeed lacking. I will make sure to add this kind of
details next time.

> > Since the removal a few releases ago of the __morecore() hook in glibc,
> > the main feature of libhugetlbfs is ELF segments remapping. I think
> > there are definitely a lot of users that simply deal with this
> > unnecessary limitation.
> >
> > I am certainly not shoving this patch through anyone's throat if there
> > is no interest. But we definitely find it a very useful feature ...
>
> Let me try to see if we can get this done cleaner.
>
> One ugly part (in general here) is the custom page replacement in the
> registration part.
>
> We are guaranteed to have a MAP_PRIVATE mapping. Instead of replacing pages
> ourselves (which we likely shouldn't do ...) ... maybe we could use
> FAULT_FLAG_UNSHARE faults such that we will get an anonymous folio
> populated. (like KSM does nowadays)
>
> Punching FOLL_PIN|FOLL_LONGTERM into GUP would achieve the same thing, but
> using FOLL_WRITE would not work on many file systems. So maybe we have to
> trigger an unsharing fault ourselves.
>
> That would do the page replacement for us and we "should" be able to lookup
> an anonymous folio that we can then just modify, like ptrace would.
>
> But then, there is also unregistration part, with weird conditional page
> replacement. Zapping the anon page if the content matches the content of the
> original page is one thing. But why are we placing an existing anonymous
> page by a new anonymous page when the content from the original page differs
> (but matches the one from the just copied page?)?
>
> I'll have to further think about that one. It's all a bit nasty.

Sounds good to me. I am willing to help with the code when you have a
plan or testing as you see fit. Let me know.

> One thing to note is that hugetlb folios don't grow on trees. Likely, Many
> setups *don't* reserve extra hugetlb folios and you might just easily be
> running out of free hugetlb folios that you can use to break COW here
> (replace a file hugetlb by a fresh anon hugetlb page). Likely it's easy to
> make register or unregister fail.

Agreed.