userfaultfd: linux/Documentation/vm/userfaultfd.txt

userfaultfd: linux/Documentation/vm/userfaultfd.txt

This is the latest userfaultfd patchset.  The postcopy live migration
feature on the qemu side is mostly ready to be merged and it entirely
depends on the userfaultfd syscall to be merged as well.  So it'd be great
if this patchset could be reviewed for merging in -mm.

Userfaults allow to implement on demand paging from userland and more
generally they allow userland to more efficiently take control of the
behavior of page faults than what was available before (PROT_NONE +
SIGSEGV trap).

The use cases are:

1) KVM postcopy live migration (one form of cloud memory
   externalization).

   KVM postcopy live migration is the primary driver of this work:

    http://blog.zhaw.ch/icclab/setting-up-post-copy-live-migration-in-openstack/
    http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2015-02/msg04873.html

2) postcopy live migration of binaries inside linux containers:

    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/132662

3) KVM postcopy live snapshotting (allowing to limit/throttle the
   memory usage, unlike fork would, plus the avoidance of fork
   overhead in the first place).

   While the wrprotect tracking is not implemented yet, the syscall API is
   already contemplating the wrprotect fault tracking and it's generic enough
   to allow its later implementation in a backwards compatible fashion.

4) KVM userfaults on shared memory. The UFFDIO_COPY lowlevel method
   should be extended to work also on tmpfs and then the
   uffdio_register.ioctls will notify userland that UFFDIO_COPY is
   available even when the registered virtual memory range is tmpfs
   backed.

5) alternate mechanism to notify web browsers or apps on embedded
   devices that volatile pages have been reclaimed. This basically
   avoids the need to run a syscall before the app can access with the
   CPU the virtual regions marked volatile. This depends on point 4)
   to be fulfilled first, as volatile pages happily apply to tmpfs.

Even though there wasn't a real use case requesting it yet, it also
allows to implement distributed shared memory in a way that readonly
shared mappings can exist simultaneously in different hosts and they
can be become exclusive at the first wrprotect fault.

This patch (of 22):

Add documentation.

Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Cc: Sanidhya Kashyap <sanidhya.gatech@gmail.com>
Cc: zhang.zhanghailiang@huawei.com
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla <andreslc@google.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Peter Feiner <pfeiner@google.com>
Cc: "Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: "Huangpeng (Peter)" <peter.huangpeng@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>