Patch series "userfaultfd: write protection support", v6.
Overview
========
The uffd-wp work was initialized by Shaohua Li [1], and later continued by
Andrea [2]. This series is based upon Andrea's latest userfaultfd tree,
and it is a continuous works from both Shaohua and Andrea. Many of the
follow up ideas come from Andrea too.
Besides the old MISSING register mode of userfaultfd, the new uffd-wp
support provides another alternative register mode called
UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_WP that can be used to listen to not only missing
page faults but also write protection page faults, or even they can be
registered together. At the same time, the new feature also provides a
new userfaultfd ioctl called UFFDIO_WRITEPROTECT which allows the
userspace to write protect a range or memory or fixup write permission of
faulted pages.
Please refer to the document patch "userfaultfd: wp:
UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_WP documentation update" for more information on the
new interface and what it can do.
The major workflow of an uffd-wp program should be:
1. Register a memory region with WP mode using UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_WP
2. Write protect part of the whole registered region using
UFFDIO_WRITEPROTECT, passing in UFFDIO_WRITEPROTECT_MODE_WP to
show that we want to write protect the range.
3. Start a working thread that modifies the protected pages,
meanwhile listening to UFFD messages.
4. When a write is detected upon the protected range, page fault
happens, a UFFD message will be generated and reported to the
page fault handling thread
5. The page fault handler thread resolves the page fault using the
new UFFDIO_WRITEPROTECT ioctl, but this time passing in
!UFFDIO_WRITEPROTECT_MODE_WP instead showing that we want to
recover the write permission. Before this operation, the fault
handler thread can do anything it wants, e.g., dumps the page to
a persistent storage.
6. The worker thread will continue running with the correctly
applied write permission from step 5.
Currently there are already two projects that are based on this new
userfaultfd feature.
QEMU Live Snapshot: The project provides a way to allow the QEMU
hypervisor to take snapshot of VMs without
stopping the VM [3].
LLNL umap library: The project provides a mmap-like interface and
"allow to have an application specific buffer of
pages cached from a large file, i.e. out-of-core
execution using memory map" [4][5].
Before posting the patchset, this series was smoke tested against QEMU
live snapshot and the LLNL umap library (by doing parallel quicksort using
128 sorting threads + 80 uffd servicing threads). My sincere thanks to
Marty Mcfadden and Denis Plotnikov for the help along the way.
TODO
====
- hugetlbfs/shmem support
- performance
- more architectures
- cooperate with mprotect()-allowed processes (???)
- ...
References
==========
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/666187/
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/andrea/aa.git/log/?h=userfault
[3] https://github.com/denis-plotnikov/qemu/commits/background-snapshot-kvm
[4] https://github.com/LLNL/umap
[5] https://llnl-umap.readthedocs.io/en/develop/
[6] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/andrea/aa.git/commit/?h=userfault&id=
b245ecf6cf59156966f3da6e6b674f6695a5ffa5
[7] https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/11/21/370
[8] https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/30/64
This patch (of 19):
Add helper for writeprotect check. Will use it later.
Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Jerome Glisse <jglisse@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Bobby Powers <bobbypowers@gmail.com>
Cc: Brian Geffon <bgeffon@google.com>
Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Cc: Denis Plotnikov <dplotnikov@virtuozzo.com>
Cc: "Dr . David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com>
Cc: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org>
Cc: Marty McFadden <mcfadden8@llnl.gov>
Cc: Maya Gokhale <gokhale2@llnl.gov>
Cc: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@oracle.com>
Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200220163112.11409-2-peterx@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>