7550c60798
Patch series "THP eligibility reporting via proc". This series of three patches aims at making THP eligibility reporting much more robust and long term sustainable. The trigger for the change is a regression report [2] and the long follow up discussion. In short the specific application didn't have good API to query whether a particular mapping can be backed by THP so it has used VMA flags to workaround that. These flags represent a deep internal state of VMAs and as such they should be used by userspace with a great deal of caution. A similar has happened for [3] when users complained that VM_MIXEDMAP is no longer set on DAX mappings. Again a lack of a proper API led to an abuse. The first patch in the series tries to emphasise that that the semantic of flags might change and any application consuming those should be really careful. The remaining two patches provide a more suitable interface to address [2] and provide a consistent API to query the THP status both for each VMA and process wide as well. [1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181120103515.25280-1-mhocko@kernel.org [2] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/http://lkml.kernel.org/r/alpine.DEB.2.21.1809241054050.224429@chino.kir.corp.google.com [3] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181002100531.GC4135@quack2.suse.cz This patch (of 3): Even though vma flags exported via /proc/<pid>/smaps are explicitly documented to be not guaranteed for future compatibility the warning doesn't go far enough because it doesn't mention semantic changes to those flags. And they are important as well because these flags are a deep implementation internal to the MM code and the semantic might change at any time. Let's consider two recent examples: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181002100531.GC4135@quack2.suse.cz : commit |
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README
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.