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authorMinchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>2020-10-17 16:14:59 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2020-10-18 09:27:10 -0700
commitecb8ac8b1f146915aa6b96449b66dd48984caacc (patch)
treeaed9514b8c37f8e6f55bad9d490c2ad784b009ce /kernel/sys_ni.c
parent1aa92cd31c1c032ddfed27e79d646bbb429e9b52 (diff)
mm/madvise: introduce process_madvise() syscall: an external memory hinting API
There is usecase that System Management Software(SMS) want to give a memory hint like MADV_[COLD|PAGEEOUT] to other processes and in the case of Android, it is the ActivityManagerService. The information required to make the reclaim decision is not known to the app. Instead, it is known to the centralized userspace daemon(ActivityManagerService), and that daemon must be able to initiate reclaim on its own without any app involvement. To solve the issue, this patch introduces a new syscall process_madvise(2). It uses pidfd of an external process to give the hint. It also supports vector address range because Android app has thousands of vmas due to zygote so it's totally waste of CPU and power if we should call the syscall one by one for each vma.(With testing 2000-vma syscall vs 1-vector syscall, it showed 15% performance improvement. I think it would be bigger in real practice because the testing ran very cache friendly environment). Another potential use case for the vector range is to amortize the cost ofTLB shootdowns for multiple ranges when using MADV_DONTNEED; this could benefit users like TCP receive zerocopy and malloc implementations. In future, we could find more usecases for other advises so let's make it happens as API since we introduce a new syscall at this moment. With that, existing madvise(2) user could replace it with process_madvise(2) with their own pid if they want to have batch address ranges support feature. ince it could affect other process's address range, only privileged process(PTRACE_MODE_ATTACH_FSCREDS) or something else(e.g., being the same UID) gives it the right to ptrace the process could use it successfully. The flag argument is reserved for future use if we need to extend the API. I think supporting all hints madvise has/will supported/support to process_madvise is rather risky. Because we are not sure all hints make sense from external process and implementation for the hint may rely on the caller being in the current context so it could be error-prone. Thus, I just limited hints as MADV_[COLD|PAGEOUT] in this patch. If someone want to add other hints, we could hear the usecase and review it for each hint. It's safer for maintenance rather than introducing a buggy syscall but hard to fix it later. So finally, the API is as follows, ssize_t process_madvise(int pidfd, const struct iovec *iovec, unsigned long vlen, int advice, unsigned int flags); DESCRIPTION The process_madvise() system call is used to give advice or directions to the kernel about the address ranges from external process as well as local process. It provides the advice to address ranges of process described by iovec and vlen. The goal of such advice is to improve system or application performance. The pidfd selects the process referred to by the PID file descriptor specified in pidfd. (See pidofd_open(2) for further information) The pointer iovec points to an array of iovec structures, defined in <sys/uio.h> as: struct iovec { void *iov_base; /* starting address */ size_t iov_len; /* number of bytes to be advised */ }; The iovec describes address ranges beginning at address(iov_base) and with size length of bytes(iov_len). The vlen represents the number of elements in iovec. The advice is indicated in the advice argument, which is one of the following at this moment if the target process specified by pidfd is external. MADV_COLD MADV_PAGEOUT Permission to provide a hint to external process is governed by a ptrace access mode PTRACE_MODE_ATTACH_FSCREDS check; see ptrace(2). The process_madvise supports every advice madvise(2) has if target process is in same thread group with calling process so user could use process_madvise(2) to extend existing madvise(2) to support vector address ranges. RETURN VALUE On success, process_madvise() returns the number of bytes advised. This return value may be less than the total number of requested bytes, if an error occurred. The caller should check return value to determine whether a partial advice occurred. FAQ: Q.1 - Why does any external entity have better knowledge? Quote from Sandeep "For Android, every application (including the special SystemServer) are forked from Zygote. The reason of course is to share as many libraries and classes between the two as possible to benefit from the preloading during boot. After applications start, (almost) all of the APIs end up calling into this SystemServer process over IPC (binder) and back to the application. In a fully running system, the SystemServer monitors every single process periodically to calculate their PSS / RSS and also decides which process is "important" to the user for interactivity. So, because of how these processes start _and_ the fact that the SystemServer is looping to monitor each process, it does tend to *know* which address range of the application is not used / useful. Besides, we can never rely on applications to clean things up themselves. We've had the "hey app1, the system is low on memory, please trim your memory usage down" notifications for a long time[1]. They rely on applications honoring the broadcasts and very few do. So, if we want to avoid the inevitable killing of the application and restarting it, some way to be able to tell the OS about unimportant memory in these applications will be useful. - ssp Q.2 - How to guarantee the race(i.e., object validation) between when giving a hint from an external process and get the hint from the target process? process_madvise operates on the target process's address space as it exists at the instant that process_madvise is called. If the space target process can run between the time the process_madvise process inspects the target process address space and the time that process_madvise is actually called, process_madvise may operate on memory regions that the calling process does not expect. It's the responsibility of the process calling process_madvise to close this race condition. For example, the calling process can suspend the target process with ptrace, SIGSTOP, or the freezer cgroup so that it doesn't have an opportunity to change its own address space before process_madvise is called. Another option is to operate on memory regions that the caller knows a priori will be unchanged in the target process. Yet another option is to accept the race for certain process_madvise calls after reasoning that mistargeting will do no harm. The suggested API itself does not provide synchronization. It also apply other APIs like move_pages, process_vm_write. The race isn't really a problem though. Why is it so wrong to require that callers do their own synchronization in some manner? Nobody objects to write(2) merely because it's possible for two processes to open the same file and clobber each other's writes --- instead, we tell people to use flock or something. Think about mmap. It never guarantees newly allocated address space is still valid when the user tries to access it because other threads could unmap the memory right before. That's where we need synchronization by using other API or design from userside. It shouldn't be part of API itself. If someone needs more fine-grained synchronization rather than process level, there were two ideas suggested - cookie[2] and anon-fd[3]. Both are applicable via using last reserved argument of the API but I don't think it's necessary right now since we have already ways to prevent the race so don't want to add additional complexity with more fine-grained optimization model. To make the API extend, it reserved an unsigned long as last argument so we could support it in future if someone really needs it. Q.3 - Why doesn't ptrace work? Injecting an madvise in the target process using ptrace would not work for us because such injected madvise would have to be executed by the target process, which means that process would have to be runnable and that creates the risk of the abovementioned race and hinting a wrong VMA. Furthermore, we want to act the hint in caller's context, not the callee's, because the callee is usually limited in cpuset/cgroups or even freezed state so they can't act by themselves quick enough, which causes more thrashing/kill. It doesn't work if the target process are ptraced(e.g., strace, debugger, minidump) because a process can have at most one ptracer. [1] https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/memory" [2] process_getinfo for getting the cookie which is updated whenever vma of process address layout are changed - Daniel Colascione - https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190520035254.57579-1-minchan@kernel.org/T/#m7694416fd179b2066a2c62b5b139b14e3894e224 [3] anonymous fd which is used for the object(i.e., address range) validation - Michal Hocko - https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200120112722.GY18451@dhcp22.suse.cz/ [minchan@kernel.org: fix process_madvise build break for arm64] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200303145756.GA219683@google.com [minchan@kernel.org: fix build error for mips of process_madvise] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200508052517.GA197378@google.com [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix patch ordering issue] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix arm64 whoops] [minchan@kernel.org: make process_madvise() vlen arg have type size_t, per Florian] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix i386 build] [sfr@canb.auug.org.au: fix syscall numbering] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200905142639.49fc3f1a@canb.auug.org.au [sfr@canb.auug.org.au: madvise.c needs compat.h] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200908204547.285646b4@canb.auug.org.au [minchan@kernel.org: fix mips build] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200909173655.GC2435453@google.com [yuehaibing@huawei.com: remove duplicate header which is included twice] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200915121550.30584-1-yuehaibing@huawei.com [minchan@kernel.org: do not use helper functions for process_madvise] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200921175539.GB387368@google.com [akpm@linux-foundation.org: pidfd_get_pid() gained an argument] [sfr@canb.auug.org.au: fix up for "iov_iter: transparently handle compat iovecs in import_iovec"] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200928212542.468e1fef@canb.auug.org.au Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: YueHaibing <yuehaibing@huawei.com> Signed-off-by: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Reviewed-by: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com> Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Cc: Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@linux.intel.com> Cc: Brian Geffon <bgeffon@google.com> Cc: Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io> Cc: Daniel Colascione <dancol@google.com> Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Cc: Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: John Dias <joaodias@google.com> Cc: Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@virtuozzo.com> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Cc: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@redhat.com> Cc: Sandeep Patil <sspatil@google.com> Cc: SeongJae Park <sj38.park@gmail.com> Cc: SeongJae Park <sjpark@amazon.de> Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com> Cc: Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@google.com> Cc: Tim Murray <timmurray@google.com> Cc: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com> Cc: Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> Cc: <linux-man@vger.kernel.org> Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200302193630.68771-3-minchan@kernel.org Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200508183320.GA125527@google.com Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200622192900.22757-4-minchan@kernel.org Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200901000633.1920247-4-minchan@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'kernel/sys_ni.c')
-rw-r--r--kernel/sys_ni.c1
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/kernel/sys_ni.c b/kernel/sys_ni.c
index c925d1e1777e..f27ac94d5fa7 100644
--- a/kernel/sys_ni.c
+++ b/kernel/sys_ni.c
@@ -280,6 +280,7 @@ COND_SYSCALL(mlockall);
COND_SYSCALL(munlockall);
COND_SYSCALL(mincore);
COND_SYSCALL(madvise);
+COND_SYSCALL(process_madvise);
COND_SYSCALL(remap_file_pages);
COND_SYSCALL(mbind);
COND_SYSCALL_COMPAT(mbind);