This patch series introduces UFFDIO_REMAP feature to userfaultfd, which has long been implemented and maintained by Andrea in his local tree [1], but was not upstreamed due to lack of use cases where this approach would be better than allocating a new page and copying the contents.
UFFDIO_COPY performs ~20% better than UFFDIO_REMAP when the application needs pages to be allocated [2]. However, with UFFDIO_REMAP, if pages are available (in userspace) for recycling, as is usually the case in heap compaction algorithms, then we can avoid the page allocation and memcpy (done by UFFDIO_COPY). Also, since the pages are recycled in the userspace, we avoid the need to release (via madvise) the pages back to the kernel [3]. We see over 40% reduction (on a Google pixel 6 device) in the compacting thread’s completion time by using UFFDIO_REMAP vs. UFFDIO_COPY. This was measured using a benchmark that emulates a heap compaction implementation using userfaultfd (to allow concurrent accesses by application threads). More details of the usecase are explained in [3].
Furthermore, UFFDIO_REMAP enables remapping swapped-out pages without touching them within the same vma. Today, it can only be done by mremap, however it forces splitting the vma.
Main changes since Andrea's last version [1]: 1. Trivial translations from page to folio, mmap_sem to mmap_lock 2. Replace pmd_trans_unstable() with pte_offset_map_nolock() and handle its possible failure 3. Move pte mapping into remap_pages_pte to allow for retries when source page or anon_vma is contended. Since pte_offset_map_nolock() start RCU read section, we can't block anymore after mapping a pte, so have to unmap the ptesm do the locking and retry. 4. Add and use anon_vma_trylock_write() to avoid blocking while in RCU read section. 5. Accommodate changes in mmu_notifier_range_init() API, switch to mmu_notifier_invalidate_range_start_nonblock() to avoid blocking while in RCU read section. 6. Open-code now removed __swp_swapcount() 7. Replace pmd_read_atomic() with pmdp_get_lockless() 8. Add new selftest for UFFDIO_REMAP
[1] https://gitlab.com/aarcange/aa/-/commit/2aec7aea56b10438a3881a20a411aa4b1fc1... [2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/1425575884-2574-1-git-send-email-aarcange@redhat... [3] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/CA+EESO4uO84SSnBhArH4HvLNhaUQ5nZKNKXqxRCyjn...
Andrea Arcangeli (2): userfaultfd: UFFDIO_REMAP: rmap preparation userfaultfd: UFFDIO_REMAP uABI
Suren Baghdasaryan (1): selftests/mm: add UFFDIO_REMAP ioctl test
fs/userfaultfd.c | 49 ++ include/linux/rmap.h | 5 + include/linux/userfaultfd_k.h | 17 + include/uapi/linux/userfaultfd.h | 22 + mm/huge_memory.c | 118 ++++ mm/khugepaged.c | 3 + mm/rmap.c | 13 + mm/userfaultfd.c | 586 +++++++++++++++++++ tools/testing/selftests/mm/uffd-common.c | 34 +- tools/testing/selftests/mm/uffd-common.h | 1 + tools/testing/selftests/mm/uffd-unit-tests.c | 62 ++ 11 files changed, 908 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)