mm/madvise: introduce MADV_POPULATE_(READ|WRITE) to prefault page tables
I. Background: Sparse Memory Mappings When we manage sparse memory mappings dynamically in user space - also sometimes involving MAP_NORESERVE - we want to dynamically populate/ discard memory inside such a sparse memory region. Example users are hypervisors (especially implementing memory ballooning or similar technologies like virtio-mem) and memory allocators. In addition, we want to fail in a nice way (instead of generating SIGBUS) if populating does not succeed because we are out of backend memory (which can happen easily with file-based mappings, especially tmpfs and hugetlbfs). While MADV_DONTNEED, MADV_REMOVE and FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE allow for reliably discarding memory for most mapping types, there is no generic approach to populate page tables and preallocate memory. Although mmap() supports MAP_POPULATE, it is not applicable to the concept of sparse memory mappings, where we want to populate/discard dynamically and av...
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