Re: [RFC 7/7] mm: madvise support MADV_ANONYMOUS_FILTER and MADV_FILE_FILTER

From: Minchan Kim
Date: Tue May 28 2019 - 04:52:54 EST


On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 01:31:13AM -0700, Daniel Colascione wrote:
> On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 1:14 AM Minchan Kim <minchan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > if we went with the per vma fd approach then you would get this
> > > feature automatically because map_files would refer to file backed
> > > mappings while map_anon could refer only to anonymous mappings.
> >
> > The reason to add such filter option is to avoid the parsing overhead
> > so map_anon wouldn't be helpful.
>
> Without chiming on whether the filter option is a good idea, I'd like
> to suggest that providing an efficient binary interfaces for pulling
> memory map information out of processes. Some single-system-call
> method for retrieving a binary snapshot of a process's address space
> complete with attributes (selectable, like statx?) for each VMA would
> reduce complexity and increase performance in a variety of areas,
> e.g., Android memory map debugging commands.

I agree it's the best we can get *generally*.
Michal, any opinion?