[PATCH v3 26/35] mm: fall back to mmap_lock if vma->anon_vma is not yet set

[Suren Baghdasaryan]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 8:05 AM Matthew Wilcox <willy at infradead.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 06:14:59PM -0800, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 11:43 AM Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb at google.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 7:44 AM Matthew Wilcox <willy at infradead.org> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 09:17:41PM -0800, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
> > > > > When vma->anon_vma is not set, page fault handler will set it by either
> > > > > reusing anon_vma of an adjacent VMA if VMAs are compatible or by
> > > > > allocating a new one. find_mergeable_anon_vma() walks VMA tree to find
> > > > > a compatible adjacent VMA and that requires not only the faulting VMA
> > > > > to be stable but also the tree structure and other VMAs inside that tree.
> > > > > Therefore locking just the faulting VMA is not enough for this search.
> > > > > Fall back to taking mmap_lock when vma->anon_vma is not set. This
> > > > > situation happens only on the first page fault and should not affect
> > > > > overall performance.
> > > >
> > > > I think I asked this before, but don't remember getting an aswer.
> > > > Why do we defer setting anon_vma to the first fault?  Why don't we
> > > > set it up at mmap time?
> > >
> > > Yeah, I remember that conversation Matthew and I could not find the
> > > definitive answer at the time. I'll look into that again or maybe
> > > someone can answer it here.
> >
> > After looking into it again I'm still under the impression that
> > vma->anon_vma is populated lazily (during the first page fault rather
> > than at mmap time) to avoid doing extra work for areas which are never
> > faulted. Though I might be missing some important detail here.
>
> How often does userspace call mmap() and then _never_ fault on it?
> I appreciate that userspace might mmap() gigabytes of address space and
> then only end up using a small amount of it, so populating it lazily
> makes sense.  But creating a region and never faulting on it?  The only
> use-case I can think of is loading shared libraries:
>
> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
> (...)
> mmap(NULL, 1970000, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7f0ce612e000
> mmap(0x7f0ce6154000, 1396736, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x26000) = 0x7f0ce6154000
> mmap(0x7f0ce62a9000, 339968, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x17b000) = 0x7f0ce62a9000
> mmap(0x7f0ce62fc000, 24576, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x1ce000) = 0x7f0ce62fc000
> mmap(0x7f0ce6302000, 53072, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f0ce6302000
>
> but that's a file-backed VMA, not an anon VMA.

Might the case of dup_mmap() while forking be the reason why a VMA in
the child process might be never used while parent uses it (or visa
versa)? Again, I'm not sure this is the reason but I can find no other
good explanation.