[private] Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] madvise MADV_DOEXEC

David Hildenbrand
2021-08-16T12:27:53Z

On 16.08.21 14:07, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2021 at 10:02:22AM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>> Mappings within this address range behave as if they were shared
>>> between threads, so a write to a MAP_PRIVATE mapping will create a
>>> page which is shared between all the sharers. The first process that
>>> declares an address range mshare'd can continue to map objects in the
>>> shared area. All other processes that want mshare'd access to this
>>> memory area can do so by calling mshare(). After this call, the
>>> address range given by mshare becomes a shared range in its address
>>> space. Anonymous mappings will be shared and not COWed.
>>
>> Did I understand correctly that you want to share actual page tables between
>> processes and consequently different MMs? That sounds like a very bad idea.
>
> That is the entire point. Consider a machine with 10,000 instances
> of an application running (process model, not thread model). If each
> application wants to map 1TB of RAM using 2MB pages, that's 4MB of page
> tables per process or 40GB of RAM for the whole machine.

Note that I am working on asynchronous reclaim of page tables, whereby I
would even reclaim !anonymous page tables under memory pressure.

Assuming your processes don't touch all memory all the time of course
... of course, it's a research project and will still require quite some
work because devil is in the detail (locking).

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb