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[v1,0/5] arm64/mm: uffd write-protect and soft-dirty tracking

Message ID 20240419074344.2643212-1-ryan.roberts@arm.com (mailing list archive)
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Series arm64/mm: uffd write-protect and soft-dirty tracking | expand

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Ryan Roberts April 19, 2024, 7:43 a.m. UTC
Hi All,

This series adds uffd write-protect and soft-dirty tracking support for arm64. I
consider the soft-dirty support (patches 3 and 4) as RFC - see rationale below.

Previous attempts to add these features have failed because of a perceived lack
of available PTE SW bits. However it actually turns out that there are 2
available but they are hidden. PTE_PROT_NONE was previously occupying a SW bit,
but it only applies when PTE_VALID is clear, so this is moved to overlay PTE_UXN
in patch 1, freeing up the SW bit. Bit 63 is marked as "IGNORED" in the Arm ARM,
but it does not currently indicate "reserved for SW use" like it does for the
other SW bits. I've confirmed with the spec owner that this is an oversight; the
bit is intended to be reserved for SW use and the spec will clarify this in a
future update.

So we have our two bits; patch 2 enables uffd-wp, patch 3 enables soft-dirty and
patches 4 and 5 sort out the selftests so that the soft-dirty tests are compiled
for, and run on arm64.

That said, these are the last 2 SW bits and we may want to keep 1 bit in reserve
for future use. soft-dirty is only used for CRIU to my knowledge, and it is
thought that their use case could be solved with the more generic uffd-wp. So
unless somebody makes a clear case for the inclusion of soft-dirty support, we
are probably better off dropping patches 3 and 4 and keeping bit 63 for future
use. Although note that the most recent attempt to add soft-dirty for arm64 was
last month [1] so I'd like to give Shivansh Vij the opportunity to make the
case.

---8<---
As an appendix, I've also experimented with adding an "extended SW bits" region
linked by the `struct ptdesc` (which you can always find from the `pte_t *`). If
demonstrated to work, this would act as an insurance policy in case we ever need
more SW bits in future, giving us confidence to merge soft-dirty now.
Unfortunately this approach suffers from 2 problems; 1) its slow; my fork()
microbenchmark takes 40% longer in the worst case. 2) it is not possible to read
the HW pte and the extended SW bits atomically so it is impossible to implement
ptep_get_lockess() in its current form. So I've abandoned this experiment. (I
can provide more details if there is interest).
---8<---

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/MW4PR12MB687563EFB56373E8D55DDEABB92B2@MW4PR12MB6875.namprd12.prod.outlook.com/

Thanks,
Ryan


Ryan Roberts (5):
  arm64/mm: Move PTE_PROT_NONE and PMD_PRESENT_INVALID
  arm64/mm: Add uffd write-protect support
  arm64/mm: Add soft-dirty page tracking support
  selftests/mm: Enable soft-dirty tests on arm64
  selftests/mm: soft-dirty should fail if a testcase fails

 arch/arm64/Kconfig                         |   2 +
 arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable-prot.h      |  20 +++-
 arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h           | 118 +++++++++++++++++++--
 arch/arm64/mm/contpte.c                    |   6 +-
 arch/arm64/mm/fault.c                      |   3 +-
 arch/arm64/mm/hugetlbpage.c                |   6 +-
 tools/testing/selftests/mm/Makefile        |   5 +-
 tools/testing/selftests/mm/madv_populate.c |  26 +----
 tools/testing/selftests/mm/run_vmtests.sh  |   5 +-
 tools/testing/selftests/mm/soft-dirty.c    |   2 +-
 10 files changed, 141 insertions(+), 52 deletions(-)

--
2.25.1

Comments

Ryan Roberts April 19, 2024, 7:47 a.m. UTC | #1
On 19/04/2024 08:43, Ryan Roberts wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> This series adds uffd write-protect and soft-dirty tracking support for arm64. I
> consider the soft-dirty support (patches 3 and 4) as RFC - see rationale below.
> 
> Previous attempts to add these features have failed because of a perceived lack
> of available PTE SW bits. However it actually turns out that there are 2
> available but they are hidden. PTE_PROT_NONE was previously occupying a SW bit,
> but it only applies when PTE_VALID is clear, so this is moved to overlay PTE_UXN
> in patch 1, freeing up the SW bit. Bit 63 is marked as "IGNORED" in the Arm ARM,
> but it does not currently indicate "reserved for SW use" like it does for the
> other SW bits. I've confirmed with the spec owner that this is an oversight; the
> bit is intended to be reserved for SW use and the spec will clarify this in a
> future update.
> 
> So we have our two bits; patch 2 enables uffd-wp, patch 3 enables soft-dirty and
> patches 4 and 5 sort out the selftests so that the soft-dirty tests are compiled
> for, and run on arm64.
> 
> That said, these are the last 2 SW bits and we may want to keep 1 bit in reserve
> for future use. soft-dirty is only used for CRIU to my knowledge, and it is
> thought that their use case could be solved with the more generic uffd-wp. So
> unless somebody makes a clear case for the inclusion of soft-dirty support, we
> are probably better off dropping patches 3 and 4 and keeping bit 63 for future
> use. Although note that the most recent attempt to add soft-dirty for arm64 was
> last month [1] so I'd like to give Shivansh Vij the opportunity to make the
> case.

Ugh, forgot to mention that this applies on top of v6.9-rc3, and all the uffd-wp
and soft-dirty tests in the mm selftests suite run and pass. And no regressions
are observed in any of the other selftests.


> 
> ---8<---
> As an appendix, I've also experimented with adding an "extended SW bits" region
> linked by the `struct ptdesc` (which you can always find from the `pte_t *`). If
> demonstrated to work, this would act as an insurance policy in case we ever need
> more SW bits in future, giving us confidence to merge soft-dirty now.
> Unfortunately this approach suffers from 2 problems; 1) its slow; my fork()
> microbenchmark takes 40% longer in the worst case. 2) it is not possible to read
> the HW pte and the extended SW bits atomically so it is impossible to implement
> ptep_get_lockess() in its current form. So I've abandoned this experiment. (I
> can provide more details if there is interest).
> ---8<---
> 
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/MW4PR12MB687563EFB56373E8D55DDEABB92B2@MW4PR12MB6875.namprd12.prod.outlook.com/
> 
> Thanks,
> Ryan
> 
> 
> Ryan Roberts (5):
>   arm64/mm: Move PTE_PROT_NONE and PMD_PRESENT_INVALID
>   arm64/mm: Add uffd write-protect support
>   arm64/mm: Add soft-dirty page tracking support
>   selftests/mm: Enable soft-dirty tests on arm64
>   selftests/mm: soft-dirty should fail if a testcase fails
> 
>  arch/arm64/Kconfig                         |   2 +
>  arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable-prot.h      |  20 +++-
>  arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h           | 118 +++++++++++++++++++--
>  arch/arm64/mm/contpte.c                    |   6 +-
>  arch/arm64/mm/fault.c                      |   3 +-
>  arch/arm64/mm/hugetlbpage.c                |   6 +-
>  tools/testing/selftests/mm/Makefile        |   5 +-
>  tools/testing/selftests/mm/madv_populate.c |  26 +----
>  tools/testing/selftests/mm/run_vmtests.sh  |   5 +-
>  tools/testing/selftests/mm/soft-dirty.c    |   2 +-
>  10 files changed, 141 insertions(+), 52 deletions(-)
> 
> --
> 2.25.1
>
Shivansh Vij April 19, 2024, 8:19 a.m. UTC | #2
Hey All,

On Fri, Apr 19, 2024 at 3:47 AM, Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com<mailto:ryan.roberts@arm.com>> wrote:

On 19/04/2024 08:43, Ryan Roberts wrote:

Hi All,

This series adds uffd write-protect and soft-dirty tracking support for arm64. I consider the soft-dirty support (patches 3 and 4) as RFC - see rationale below.

Previous attempts to add these features have failed because of a perceived lack of available PTE SW bits. However it actually turns out that there are 2 available but they are hidden. PTE_PROT_NONE was previously occupying a SW bit, but it only applies when PTE_VALID is clear, so this is moved to overlay PTE_UXN in patch 1, freeing up the SW bit. Bit 63 is marked as "IGNORED" in the Arm ARM, but it does not currently indicate "reserved for SW use" like it does for the other SW bits. I've confirmed with the spec owner that this is an oversight; the bit is intended to be reserved for SW use and the spec will clarify this in a future update.

So we have our two bits; patch 2 enables uffd-wp, patch 3 enables soft-dirty and patches 4 and 5 sort out the selftests so that the soft-dirty tests are compiled for, and run on arm64.

That said, these are the last 2 SW bits and we may want to keep 1 bit in reserve for future use. soft-dirty is only used for CRIU to my knowledge, and it is thought that their use case could be solved with the more generic uffd-wp. So unless somebody makes a clear case for the inclusion of soft-dirty support, we are probably better off dropping patches 3 and 4 and keeping bit 63 for future use. Although note that the most recent attempt to add soft-dirty for arm64 was last month [1] so I'd like to give Shivansh Vij the opportunity to make the case.

Ugh, forgot to mention that this applies on top of v6.9-rc3, and all the uffd-wp and soft-dirty tests in the mm selftests suite run and pass. And no regressions are observed in any of the other selftests.

Appreciate the opportunity to provide input here.

I personally don't know of any applications other than CRIU that make heavy use of soft-dirty, and my use case is specifically focused on adding live-migration support to CRIU on ARM.

Cloud providers like AWS have pretty massive discounts for ARM-based spot instances (90% last time I checked), and having live-migration in CRIU would allow more applications to take advantage of that.

As Ryan mentioned, there are two ways to achieve this - add dirty tracking to ARM (Patch 3/4), or tear out the existing dirty tracking code in CRIU and replace it with uffd-wp.

I picked option one (dirty tracking in arm) because it seems to be the simplest way to move forward, whereas it would be a relatively heavy effort to add uffd-wp support to CRIU.

From a performance perspective I am also a little worried that uffd will be slower than just tracking the dirty bits asynchronously with sw dirty, but maybe that's not as much of a concern with the addition of uffd-wp async.

With all this being said, I'll defer to the wisdom of the crowd about which approach makes more sense - after all, with this patch we should get uffd-wp support on arm so at least there will be _a_ way forward for CRIU (albeit one requiring slightly more work).