Re: Re: Re: PG_reserved and compound pages

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Thu Apr 07 2016 - 11:22:41 EST


On Thu 07-04-16 15:45:02, Frank Mehnert wrote:
> On Wednesday 06 April 2016 17:33:43 Michal Hocko wrote:
[...]
> > Do you map your pages to the userspace? If yes then vma with VM_IO or
> > VM_PFNMAP should keep any attempt away from those pages.
>
> Yes, such memory objects are also mapped to userland. Do you think that
> VM_IO or VM_PFNMAP would guard against NUMA page migration?

Both auto numa and manual numa migration checks vma_migratable and that
excludes both VM flags.

> Because when
> NUMA page migration was introduced (I believe with Linux 3.8) I tested
> both flags and saw that they didn't prevent the migration on such VM
> areas. Maybe this changed in the meantime, do you have more information
> about that?

I haven't checked the history much but vma_migratable should be there
for quite some time. Maybe it wasn't used in the past. Dunno

> The drawback of at least VM_IO is that such memory is not part of a core
> dump.

that seems to be correct as per vma_dump_size

> Actually currently we use vm_insert_page() for userland mapping
> and mark the VM areas as
>
> VM_DONTEXPAND | VM_DONTDUMP

but that means that it won't end up in the dump either. Or am I missing
your point.

--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs