Skip to content
Commit 4ca9b385 authored by David Hildenbrand's avatar David Hildenbrand Committed by Linus Torvalds
Browse files

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...
parent a78f1ccd
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment