Re: [PATCH 3/4] mm: prevent KSM from completely breaking VMA merging

[David Hildenbrand]

> > I am not 100% sure why we bail out on special mappings: all we have to do is
> > reliably identify anon pages, and we should be able to do that.
>
> But they map e.g. kernel memory (at least for VM_PFNMAP, purely and by
> implication really VM_IO), it wouldn't make sense for KSM to be asked to
> try to merge these right?
>
> And of course no underlying struct page to pin, no reference counting
> either, so I think you'd end up in trouble potentially here wouldn't you?
> And how would the CoW work?

KSM only operates on anonymous pages. It cannot de-duplicate anything 
else. (therefore, only MAP_PRIVATE applies)

Anything else (no struct page, not a CoW anon folio in such a mapping) 
is skipped.

Take a look at scan_get_next_rmap_item() where we do

folio = folio_walk_start(&fw, vma, ksm_scan.address, 0);
if (folio) {
	if (!folio_is_zone_device(folio) &&
	    folio_test_anon(folio)) {
		folio_get(folio);
		tmp_page = fw.page;
	}
	folio_walk_end(&fw, vma)
}


Before I changed that code, we were using GUP. And GUP just always 
refuses VM_IO|VM_PFNMAP because it cannot handle it properly.

> > So, assuming we could remove the VM_PFNMAP | VM_IO | VM_DONTEXPAND |
> > VM_MIXEDMAP constraint from vma_ksm_compatible(), could we simplify?
>
> Well I question removing this constraint for above reasons.
>
> At any rate, even if we _could_ this feels like a bigger change that we	
> should come later.

"bigger" -- it might just be removing these 4 flags from the check ;)

I'll dig a bit more.

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb