Re: [PATCH 00/11] mm/mremap: introduce more mergeable mremap via MREMAP_RELOCATE_ANON

David Hildenbrand
2025-06-17T08:45:59Z

On 17.06.25 10:34, Pedro Falcato wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2025 at 10:41:20PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>> On 16.06.25 22:24, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>> Hi Lorenzo,
>>>
>>> as discussed offline, there is a lot going on an this is rather ... a
>>> lot of code+complexity for something that is more a corner cases. :)
>>>
>>> Corner-case as in: only select user space will benefit from this, which
>>> is really a shame.
>>>
>>> After your presentation at LSF/MM, I thought about this further, and I
>>> was wondering whether:
>>>
>>> (a) We cannot make this semi-automatic, avoiding flags.
>>>
>>> (b) We cannot simplify further by limiting it to the common+easy cases
>>> first.
>>>
>>> I think you already to some degree did b) as part of this non-RFC, which
>>> is great.
>>>
>>>
>>> So before digging into the details, let's discuss the high level problem
>>> briefly.
>>>
>>> I think there are three parts to it:
>>>
>>> (1) Detecting whether it is safe to adjust the folio->index (small
>>> folios)
>>>
>>> (2) Performance implications of doing so
>>>
>>> (3) Detecting whether it is safe to adjust the folio->index (large PTE-
>>> mapped folios)
>>>
>>>
>>> Regarding (1), if we simply track whether a folio was ever used for
>>> COW-sharing, it would be very easy: and not only for present folios, but
>>> for any anon folios that are referenced by swap/migration entries.
>>> Skimming over patch #1, I think you apply a similar logic, which is good.
>>>
>>> Regarding (2), it would apply when we mremap() anon VMAs and they happen
>>> to reside next to other anon VMAs. Which workloads are we concerned
>>> about harming by implementing this optimization? I recall that the most
>>> common use case for mremap() is actually for file mappings, but I might
>
> realloc() for mmapped allocations commonly calls mremap(), FYI (at least for
> glibc, and musl; can't bother to look at the rest).

Good point. Only for larger areas, I assume, where glibc would already
fallback to expensive mmap()+munmap() instead of using the optimized
sparse area.

>
>>> be wrong. In any case, we could just have a different way to enable this
>>> optimization than for each and every mremap() invocation in a process.
>
> /me thinks of prctl

I didn't want to spell that out :P I don't think this would have to be
configurable per process ...

>
> :P
>
>
> FWIW, with regards to the whole feature: While I do understand it's purpose (
> relocating anon might be too much for most workloads, but great for some), I'm
> uncomfortable with the amount of internals we're exposing here. Who's to say
> this is how mm rmap looks in 20 years? And we're stuck maintaining the userspace
> ABI until then.

Yes.

>
> Personally, I would prefer if we just had a flag 'MREMAP_HARDER' that would
> vaguely be documented as "mremap but harder, even if have to do a little more
> work". Then we could move things around without promising RELOCATE_ANON makes
> conceptual sense, and userspace wouldn't have to think through the implications
> of such a flag by reading Lorenzo's great book.

Even such a flag is just weird.

Next time we do MREMAP_EVEN_HARDER

mremap() is already an expensive operation ... so I think we need a
pretty convincing case to make this configurable by the user at all for
each individual mremap() invocation.

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb