Pavel reported that in case if vma area get unmapped and then mapped (or
expanded) in-place, the soft dirty tracker won't be able to recognize this
situation since it works on pte level and ptes are get zapped on unmap,
loosing soft dirty bit of course.
So to resolve this situation we need to track actions on vma level, there
VM_SOFTDIRTY flag comes in. When new vma area created (or old expanded)
we set this bit, and keep it here until application calls for clearing
soft dirty bit.
Thus when user space application track memory changes now it can detect if
vma area is renewed.
Reported-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Signed-off-by: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@openvz.org>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Cc: Xiao Guangrong <xiaoguangrong@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>
Cc: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: "Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The soft-dirty is a bit on a PTE which helps to track which pages a task
writes to. In order to do this tracking one should
1. Clear soft-dirty bits from PTEs ("echo 4 > /proc/PID/clear_refs)
2. Wait some time.
3. Read soft-dirty bits (55'th in /proc/PID/pagemap2 entries)
To do this tracking, the writable bit is cleared from PTEs when the
soft-dirty bit is. Thus, after this, when the task tries to modify a
page at some virtual address the #PF occurs and the kernel sets the
soft-dirty bit on the respective PTE.
Note, that although all the task's address space is marked as r/o after
the soft-dirty bits clear, the #PF-s that occur after that are processed
fast. This is so, since the pages are still mapped to physical memory,
and thus all the kernel does is finds this fact out and puts back
writable, dirty and soft-dirty bits on the PTE.
Another thing to note, is that when mremap moves PTEs they are marked
with soft-dirty as well, since from the user perspective mremap modifies
the virtual memory at mremap's new address.
Signed-off-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Cc: Xiao Guangrong <xiaoguangrong@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Glauber Costa <glommer@parallels.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>
Cc: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cyrill Gorcunov
Pavel Emelyanov