Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 08/17] mm: madvise MADV_USERFAULT

[Kirill A. Shutemov]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2014 at 07:07:58PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> MADV_USERFAULT is a new madvise flag that will set VM_USERFAULT in the
> vma flags. Whenever VM_USERFAULT is set in an anonymous vma, if
> userland touches a still unmapped virtual address, a sigbus signal is
> sent instead of allocating a new page. The sigbus signal handler will
> then resolve the page fault in userland by calling the
> remap_anon_pages syscall.

Hm. I wounder if this functionality really fits madvise(2) interface: as
far as I understand it, it provides a way to give a *hint* to kernel which
may or may not trigger an action from kernel side. I don't think an
application will behaive reasonably if kernel ignore the *advise* and will
not send SIGBUS, but allocate memory.

I would suggest to consider to use some other interface for the
functionality: a new syscall or, perhaps, mprotect().

-- 
 Kirill A. Shutemov