On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 4:46 PM Lokesh Gidra lokeshgidra@google.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 4:21 PM Peter Xu peterx@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 02, 2023 at 10:00:03AM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
In case we cannot simply remap the page, the fallback sequence (from the cover letter) would be triggered.
- UFFDIO_COPY
- MADV_DONTNEED
So we would just handle the operation internally without a fallback.
Note that I think there will be a slight difference on whole remap atomicity, on what happens if the page is modified after UFFDIO_COPY but before DONTNEED.
UFFDIO_REMAP guarantees full atomicity when moving the page, IOW, threads can be updating the pages when ioctl(UFFDIO_REMAP), data won't get lost during movement, and it will generate a missing event after moved, with latest data showing up on dest.
I'm not sure that means such a fallback is a problem, Suren may know better with the use case.
Although there is no problem in using fallback with our use case but as a user of userfaultfd, I'd suggest leaving it to the developer. Failing with appropriate errno makes more sense. If handled in the kernel, then the user may assume at the end of the operation that the src vma is completely unmapped. And if not correctness issues, it could lead to memory leaks.
I meant that in addition to the possibility of correctness issues due to lack of atomicity, it could also lead to memory leaks, as the user may assume that src vma is empty post-operation. IMHO, it's better to fail with errno so that the user would fix the code with necessary changes (like using DONTFORK, if forking).
Thanks,
-- Peter Xu