Date:   Fri, 17 Feb 2023 16:05:43 +0000
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
To:     Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>
Cc:     akpm@linux-foundation.org, michel@lespinasse.org,
        jglisse@google.com, mhocko@suse.com, vbabka@suse.cz,
        hannes@cmpxchg.org, mgorman@techsingularity.net, dave@stgolabs.net,
        liam.howlett@oracle.com, peterz@infradead.org,
        ldufour@linux.ibm.com, paulmck@kernel.org, mingo@redhat.com,
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        peterx@redhat.com, david@redhat.com, dhowells@redhat.com,
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        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, kernel-team@android.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 26/35] mm: fall back to mmap_lock if vma->anon_vma is
 not yet set
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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@google.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 7:44 AM Matthew Wilcox <willy@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.