Hi Peter,
sorry for replying so late, I only managed now to get back to this patch set.
Yes, I can give it a try. What I dislike about ksm_test is that it's a mixture of benchmarks and test cases that have to explicitly triggered by parameters. It's not a simple "run all available test cases" tests as we know it. So maybe something separate (or having it as part of the uffd tests) makes more sense.
We can add an entry into run_vmtests.sh. That's also what current ksm_test does.
Right, but I kind-of don't like that way at all and would much rather do it cleaner...
Yes adding into uffd test would work too, but I do have a plan that we should move functional tests out of userfaultfd.c, leaving that with the stress test only. Not really a big deal, though.
... similar to what you want to do with userfaultfd.c
So maybe I'll just add a new test for ksm functional tests.
Consequently, we will no longer trigger a fake write fault and break COW without any such side-effects.
This is primarily a fix for KSM+userfaultfd-wp, however, the fake write fault was always questionable. As this fix is not easy to backport and it's not very critical, let's not cc stable.
A patch to cc most of the stable would probably need to still go with the old write approach but attaching ALLOW_RETRY. But I agree maybe that may not need to bother, or a report should have arrived earlier.. The unshare approach looks much cleaner indeed.
A fix without FAULT_FLAG_UNSHARE is not straight forward. We really don't want to notify user space about write events here (because there is none). And there is no way around the uffd handling in WP code without that.
FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY would rely on userfaultfd triggering and having to resolve the WP event.
Right it'll be very much a false positive, but the userspace should be fine with it e.g. for live snapshot we need to copy page earlier; it still won't stop the process from running along the way. But I agree that's not ideal.
At least the test case at hand will wait until infinitely, because there is no handler that would allow break_cow to make progress (well, we don't expect write events in the test :) ).
Anyhow, I don't think messing with that for stable kernels is worth the pain / complexity / possible issues.