Here is the patch to implement madvise(MADV_REMOVE) - which frees up a
given range of pages & its associated backing store. Current
implementation supports only shmfs/tmpfs and other filesystems return
-ENOSYS.
"Some app allocates large tmpfs files, then when some task quits and some
client disconnect, some memory can be released. However the only way to
release tmpfs-swap is to MADV_REMOVE". - Andrea Arcangeli
Databases want to use this feature to drop a section of their bufferpool
(shared memory segments) - without writing back to disk/swap space.
This feature is also useful for supporting hot-plug memory on UML.
Concerns raised by Andrew Morton:
- "We have no plan for holepunching! If we _do_ have such a plan (or
might in the future) then what would the API look like? I think
sys_holepunch(fd, start, len), so we should start out with that."
- Using madvise is very weird, because people will ask "why do I need to
mmap my file before I can stick a hole in it?"
- None of the other madvise operations call into the filesystem in this
manner. A broad question is: is this capability an MM operation or a
filesytem operation? truncate, for example, is a filesystem operation
which sometimes has MM side-effects. madvise is an mm operation and with
this patch, it gains FS side-effects, only they're really, really
significant ones."
Comments:
- Andrea suggested the fs operation too but then it's more efficient to
have it as a mm operation with fs side effects, because they don't
immediatly know fd and physical offset of the range. It's possible to
fixup in userland and to use the fs operation but it's more expensive,
the vmas are already in the kernel and we can use them.
Short term plan & Future Direction:
- We seem to need this interface only for shmfs/tmpfs files in the short
term. We have to add hooks into the filesystem for correctness and
completeness. This is what this patch does.
- In the future, plan is to support both fs and mmap apis also. This
also involves (other) filesystem specific functions to be implemented.
- Current patch doesn't support VM_NONLINEAR - which can be addressed in
the future.
Signed-off-by: Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk-manpages@gmx.net>
Cc: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This replaces the (in my opinion horrible) VM_UNMAPPED logic with very
explicit support for a "remapped page range" aka VM_PFNMAP. It allows a
VM area to contain an arbitrary range of page table entries that the VM
never touches, and never considers to be normal pages.
Any user of "remap_pfn_range()" automatically gets this new
functionality, and doesn't even have to mark the pages reserved or
indeed mark them any other way. It just works. As a side effect, doing
mmap() on /dev/mem works for arbitrary ranges.
Sparc update from David in the next commit.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Although we tend to associate VM_RESERVED with remap_pfn_range, quite a few
drivers set VM_RESERVED on areas which are then populated by nopage. The
PageReserved removal in 2.6.15-rc1 changed VM_RESERVED not to free pages in
zap_pte_range, without changing those drivers not to set it: so their pages
just leak away.
Let's not change miscellaneous drivers now: introduce VM_UNPAGED at the core,
to flag the special areas where the ptes may have no struct page, or if they
have then it's not to be touched. Replace most instances of VM_RESERVED in
core mm by VM_UNPAGED. Force it on in remap_pfn_range, and the sparc and
sparc64 io_remap_pfn_range.
Revert addition of VM_RESERVED to powerpc vdso, it's not needed there. Is it
needed anywhere? It still governs the mm->reserved_vm statistic, and special
vmas not to be merged, and areas not to be core dumped; but could probably be
eliminated later (the drivers are probably specifying it because in 2.4 it
kept swapout off the vma, but in 2.6 we work from the LRU, which these pages
don't get on).
Use the VM_SHM slot for VM_UNPAGED, and define VM_SHM to 0: it serves no
purpose whatsoever, and should be removed from drivers when we clean up.
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Acked-by: William Irwin <wli@holomorphy.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Remove PageReserved() calls from core code by tightening VM_RESERVED
handling in mm/ to cover PageReserved functionality.
PageReserved special casing is removed from get_page and put_page.
All setting and clearing of PageReserved is retained, and it is now flagged
in the page_alloc checks to help ensure we don't introduce any refcount
based freeing of Reserved pages.
MAP_PRIVATE, PROT_WRITE of VM_RESERVED regions is tentatively being
deprecated. We never completely handled it correctly anyway, and is be
reintroduced in future if required (Hugh has a proof of concept).
Once PageReserved() calls are removed from kernel/power/swsusp.c, and all
arch/ and driver code, the Set and Clear calls, and the PG_reserved bit can
be trivially removed.
Last real user of PageReserved is swsusp, which uses PageReserved to
determine whether a struct page points to valid memory or not. This still
needs to be addressed (a generic page_is_ram() should work).
A last caveat: the ZERO_PAGE is now refcounted and managed with rmap (and
thus mapcounted and count towards shared rss). These writes to the struct
page could cause excessive cacheline bouncing on big systems. There are a
number of ways this could be addressed if it is an issue.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Refcount bug fix for filemap_xip.c
Signed-off-by: Carsten Otte <cotte@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Revert this recent correctness change: Douglas Crosher <dcrosher@scieneer.com>
reported that it broke an existing application, and that madvise() works
without error on anonymous mappings on Solaris.
This means that madvise() will remain non-standards-compliant: we should
return -EBADF for all requests against non-file-backed vma's, but Linux only
does this for MADV_WILLNEED requests.
Signed-off-by: Suzuki K P <suzuki@in.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Better late than never, I've at last reviewed the madvise vma merging
going into 2.6.13. Remove a pointless check and fix two little bugs -
a simple test (with /proc/<pid>/maps hacked to show ReadHints) showed
both mismerges in practice: though being madvise, neither was disastrous.
1. Correct placement of the success label in madvise_behavior: as in
mprotect_fixup and mlock_fixup, it is necessary to update vm_flags
when vma_merge succeeds (to handle the exceptional Case 8 noted in
the comments above vma_merge itself).
2. Correct initial value of prev when starting part way into a vma: as
in sys_mprotect and do_mlock, it needs to be set to vma in this case
(vma_merge handles only that minimum of cases shown in its comments).
3. If find_vma_prev sets prev, then the vma it returns is prev->vm_next,
so it's pointless to make that same assignment again in sys_madvise.
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The madvise() system call returns -EBADF for areas which does not map to
files, only for *behaviour* request MADV_WILLNEED.
According to man pages, madvise returns :
EBADF - the map exists, but the area maps something that isn't a file.
Fixes bug 2995.
Signed-off-by: Suzuki K P <suzuki@in.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch removes redundant VM_ClearReadHint from mm/madvice.c which was
left there by Prasanna's patch.
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This attempts to merge back the split maps. This code is mostly copied
from Chrisw's mlock merging from post 2.6.11 trees. The only difference is
in munmapped_error handling. Also passed prev to willneed/dontneed,
eventhogh they do not handle it now, since I felt it will be cleaner,
instead of handling prev in madvise_vma in some cases and in subfunction in
some cases.
Signed-off-by: Prasanna Meda <pmeda@akamai.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This attempts to avoid splittings when it is not needed, that is when
vm_flags are same as new flags. The idea is from the <2.6.11 mlock_fixup
and others. This will provide base for the next madvise merging patch.
Signed-off-by: Prasanna Meda <pmeda@akamai.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Badari Pulavarty