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Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active

From Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Newsgroups linux.kernel
Subject Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active
Date 2017-06-02 22:00 +0200
Message-ID <tO0TM-5uo-5@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
References <tNWn7-2Pu-17@gated-at.bofh.it>
Organization linux.* mail to news gateway

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On Fri,  2 Jun 2017 18:03:22 +0300 "Mike Rapoport" <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:

> PR_SET_THP_DISABLE has a rather subtle semantic. It doesn't affect any
> existing mapping because it only updated mm->def_flags which is a template
> for new mappings. The mappings created after prctl(PR_SET_THP_DISABLE) have
> VM_NOHUGEPAGE flag set.  This can be quite surprising for all those
> applications which do not do prctl(); fork() & exec() and want to control
> their own THP behavior.
> 
> Another usecase when the immediate semantic of the prctl might be useful is
> a combination of pre- and post-copy migration of containers with CRIU.  In
> this case CRIU populates a part of a memory region with data that was saved
> during the pre-copy stage. Afterwards, the region is registered with
> userfaultfd and CRIU expects to get page faults for the parts of the region
> that were not yet populated. However, khugepaged collapses the pages and
> the expected page faults do not occur.
> 
> In more general case, the prctl(PR_SET_THP_DISABLE) could be used as a
> temporary mechanism for enabling/disabling THP process wide.
> 
> Implementation wise, a new MMF_DISABLE_THP flag is added. This flag is
> tested when decision whether to use huge pages is taken either during page
> fault of at the time of THP collapse.
> 
> It should be noted, that the new implementation makes PR_SET_THP_DISABLE
> master override to any per-VMA setting, which was not the case previously.
>
> Fixes: a0715cc22601 ("mm, thp: add VM_INIT_DEF_MASK and PRCTL_THP_DISABLE")

"Fixes" is a bit strong.  I'd say "alters".  And significantly altering
the runtime behaviour of a three-year-old interface is rather a worry,
no?

Perhaps we should be adding new prctl modes to select this new
behaviour and leave the existing PR_SET_THP_DISABLE behaviour as-is?

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Thread

[PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active "Mike Rapoport" <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com> - 2017-06-02 17:10 +0200
  Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> - 2017-06-02 22:00 +0200
    Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> - 2017-06-02 22:40 +0200
      Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> - 2017-06-02 22:50 +0200
        Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> - 2017-06-02 23:00 +0200
          Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> - 2017-06-02 23:20 +0200
            Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> - 2017-06-05 11:30 +0200
          Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active Mike Rapoprt <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com> - 2017-06-03 12:40 +0200
            Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com> - 2017-06-05 09:10 +0200
        Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> - 2017-06-03 09:50 +0200
    Re: [PATCH] mm: make PR_SET_THP_DISABLE immediately active Mike Rapoprt <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com> - 2017-06-03 12:50 +0200

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