Re: [PATCH v6 3/3] mm/gup: disallow FOLL_LONGTERM GUP-fast writing to file-backed mappings

From: Jason Gunthorpe
Date: Tue May 02 2023 - 12:19:28 EST


On Tue, May 02, 2023 at 06:12:39PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:

> > It missses the general architectural point why we have all these
> > shootdown mechanims in other places - plares are not supposed to make
> > these kinds of assumptions. When the userspace unplugs the memory from
> > KVM or unmaps it from VFIO it is not still being accessed by the
> > kernel.
>
> Yes. Like having memory in a vfio iommu v1 and doing the same (mremap,
> munmap, MADV_DONTNEED, ...). Which is why we disable MADV_DONTNEED (e.g.,
> virtio-balloon) in QEMU with vfio.

That is different, VFIO has it's own contract how it consumes the
memory from the MM and VFIO breaks all this stuff.

But when you tell VFIO to unmap the memory it doesn't keep accessing
it in the background like this does.

Jason