Re: [PATCH RFC] mm/madvise: introduce MADV_POPULATE to prefault/prealloc memory

From: David Hildenbrand
Date: Fri Feb 19 2021 - 03:22:26 EST


On 18.02.21 23:59, Peter Xu wrote:
Hi, David,

On Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 04:48:44PM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
When we manage sparse memory mappings dynamically in user space - also
sometimes involving MADV_NORESERVE - we want to dynamically populate/
discard memory inside such a sparse memory region. Example users are
hypervisors (especially implementing memory ballooning or similar
technologies like virtio-mem) and memory allocators. In addition, we want
to fail in a nice way if populating does not succeed because we are out of
backend memory (which can happen easily with file-based mappings,
especially tmpfs and hugetlbfs).

Could you explain a bit more on how do you plan to use this new interface for
the virtio-balloon scenario?

Sure, that will bring up an interesting point to discuss (MADV_POPULATE_WRITE).

I'm planning on using it in virtio-mem: whenever the guests requests the hypervisor (via a virtio-mem device) to make specific blocks available ("plug"), I want to have a configurable option ("populate=on" / "prealloc="on") to perform safety checks ("prealloc") and populate page tables.

This becomes especially relevant for private/shared hugetlbfs and shared files/shmem where we have a limited pool size (e.g., huge pages, tmpfs size, filesystem size). But it will also come in handy when just preallocating (esp. zeroing) anonymous memory.

For virito-balloon it is not applicable because it really only supports anonymous memory and we cannot fail requests to deflate ...

--- Example ---

Example: Assume the guests requests to make 128 MB available and we're using hugetlbfs. Assume we're out of huge pages in the hypervisor - we want to fail the request - I want to do some kind of preallocation.

So I could do fallocate() on anything that's MAP_SHARED, but not on anything that's MAP_PRIVATE. hugetlbfs via memfd() cannot be preallocated without going via SIGBUS handlers.

--- QEMU memory configurations ---

I see the following combinations relevant in QEMU that I want to support with virito-mem:

1) MAP_PRIVATE anonymous memory
2) MAP_PRIVATE on hugetlbfs (esp. via memfd)
3) MAP_SHARED on hugetlbfs (esp. via memfd)
4) MAP_SHARED on shmem (file / memfd)
5) MAP_SHARED on some sparse file.

Other MAP_PRIVATE mappings barely make any sense to me - "read the file and write to page cache" is not really applicable to VM RAM (not to mention doing fallocate(PUNCH_HOLE) that invalidates the private copies of all other mappings on that file).

--- Ways to populate/preallocate ---

I see the following ways to populate/preallocate:

a) MADV_POPULATE: write fault on writable MAP_PRIVATE, read fault on
MAP_SHARED
b) Writing to MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_SHARED from user space.
c) (below) MADV_POPULATE_WRITE: write fault on writable MAP_PRIVATE |
MAP_SHARED

Especially, 2) is kind of weird as implemented in QEMU (util/oslib-posix.c:do_touch_pages):

"Read & write back the same value, so we don't corrupt existing user/app data ... TODO: get a better solution from kernel so we don't need to write at all so we don't cause wear on the storage backing the region..."

So if we have zero, we write zero. We'll COW pages, triggering a write fault - and that's the only good thing about it. For example, similar to MADV_POPULATE, nothing stops KSM from merging anonymous pages again. So for anonymous memory the actual write is not helpful at all. Similarly for hugetlbfs, the actual write is not necessary - but there is no other way to really achieve the goal.

--- How MADV_POPULATE is useful ---

With virito-mem, our VM will usually write to memory before it reads it.

With 1) and 2) it does exactly what I want: trigger COW / allocate memory and trigger a write fault. The only issue with 1) is that KSM might come around and undo our work - but that could only be avoided by writing random numbers to all pages from user space. Or we could simply rather disable KSM in that setup ...

--- How MADV_POPULATE is not perfect ---

KSM can merge anonymous pages again. Just like the current QEMU implementation. The only way around that is writing random numbers to the pages or mlocking all memory. No big news.

Nothing stops reclaim/swap code from depopulating when using files. Again, no big new - we have to mlock.

--- HOW MADV_POPULATE_WRITE might be useful ---

With 3) 4) 5) MADV_POPULATE does partially what I want: preallocate memory and populate page tables. But as it's a read fault, I think we'll have another minor fault on access. Not perfect, but better than failing with SIGBUS. One way around that would be having an additional MADV_POPULATE_WRITE, to use in cases where it makes sense (I think at least 3) and 4), most probably not on actual files like 5) ).

Trigger a write fault without actually writing.


Makes sense?

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb