MADV_DONTNEED historically rejects mlocked ranges, but with MLOCK_ONFAULT
and MCL_ONFAULT allowing to mlock without populating, there are valid use
cases for depopulating locked ranges as well.
Users mlock memory to protect secrets. There are allocators for secure
buffers that want in-use memory generally mlocked, but cleared and
invalidated memory to give up the physical pages. This could be done with
explicit munlock -> mlock calls on free -> alloc of course, but that adds
two unnecessary syscalls, heavy mmap_sem write locks, vma splits and
re-merges - only to get rid of the backing pages.
Users also mlockall(MCL_ONFAULT) to suppress sustained paging, but are
okay with on-demand initial population. It seems valid to selectively
free some memory during the lifetime of such a process, without having to
mess with its overall policy.
Why add a separate flag? Isn't this a pretty niche usecase?
- MADV_DONTNEED has been bailing on locked vmas forever. It's at least
conceivable that someone, somewhere is relying on mlock to protect
data from perhaps broader invalidation calls. Changing this behavior
now could lead to quiet data corruption.
- It also clarifies expectations around MADV_FREE and maybe
MADV_REMOVE. It avoids the situation where one quietly behaves
different than the others. MADV_FREE_LOCKED can be added later.
- The combination of mlock() and madvise() in the first place is
probably niche. But where it happens, I'd say that dropping pages
from a locked region once they don't contain secrets or won't page
anymore is much saner than relying on mlock to protect memory from
speculative or errant invalidation calls. It's just that we can't
change the default behavior because of the two previous points.
Given that, an explicit new flag seems to make the most sense.
[hannes@cmpxchg.org: fix mips build]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220304171912.305060-1-hannes@cmpxchg.org
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Nadav Amit <nadav.amit@gmail.com>
Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Cc: Dr. David Alan Gilbert <dgilbert@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
9457056ac4