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authorColin Cross <ccross@google.com>2022-01-15 01:05:59 +0300
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2022-01-15 17:30:27 +0300
commit9a10064f5625d5572c3626c1516e0bebc6c9fe9b (patch)
treec522ff89b62fb32fac39b383b65f3992c2f1fe36 /Documentation/filesystems
parentac1e9acc5acf0b41d54de6a4c45471644f8b97ff (diff)
downloadlinux-9a10064f5625d5572c3626c1516e0bebc6c9fe9b.tar.xz
mm: add a field to store names for private anonymous memory
In many userspace applications, and especially in VM based applications like Android uses heavily, there are multiple different allocators in use. At a minimum there is libc malloc and the stack, and in many cases there are libc malloc, the stack, direct syscalls to mmap anonymous memory, and multiple VM heaps (one for small objects, one for big objects, etc.). Each of these layers usually has its own tools to inspect its usage; malloc by compiling a debug version, the VM through heap inspection tools, and for direct syscalls there is usually no way to track them. On Android we heavily use a set of tools that use an extended version of the logic covered in Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt to walk all pages mapped in userspace and slice their usage by process, shared (COW) vs. unique mappings, backing, etc. This can account for real physical memory usage even in cases like fork without exec (which Android uses heavily to share as many private COW pages as possible between processes), Kernel SamePage Merging, and clean zero pages. It produces a measurement of the pages that only exist in that process (USS, for unique), and a measurement of the physical memory usage of that process with the cost of shared pages being evenly split between processes that share them (PSS). If all anonymous memory is indistinguishable then figuring out the real physical memory usage (PSS) of each heap requires either a pagemap walking tool that can understand the heap debugging of every layer, or for every layer's heap debugging tools to implement the pagemap walking logic, in which case it is hard to get a consistent view of memory across the whole system. Tracking the information in userspace leads to all sorts of problems. It either needs to be stored inside the process, which means every process has to have an API to export its current heap information upon request, or it has to be stored externally in a filesystem that somebody needs to clean up on crashes. It needs to be readable while the process is still running, so it has to have some sort of synchronization with every layer of userspace. Efficiently tracking the ranges requires reimplementing something like the kernel vma trees, and linking to it from every layer of userspace. It requires more memory, more syscalls, more runtime cost, and more complexity to separately track regions that the kernel is already tracking. This patch adds a field to /proc/pid/maps and /proc/pid/smaps to show a userspace-provided name for anonymous vmas. The names of named anonymous vmas are shown in /proc/pid/maps and /proc/pid/smaps as [anon:<name>]. Userspace can set the name for a region of memory by calling prctl(PR_SET_VMA, PR_SET_VMA_ANON_NAME, start, len, (unsigned long)name) Setting the name to NULL clears it. The name length limit is 80 bytes including NUL-terminator and is checked to contain only printable ascii characters (including space), except '[',']','\','$' and '`'. Ascii strings are being used to have a descriptive identifiers for vmas, which can be understood by the users reading /proc/pid/maps or /proc/pid/smaps. Names can be standardized for a given system and they can include some variable parts such as the name of the allocator or a library, tid of the thread using it, etc. The name is stored in a pointer in the shared union in vm_area_struct that points to a null terminated string. Anonymous vmas with the same name (equivalent strings) and are otherwise mergeable will be merged. The name pointers are not shared between vmas even if they contain the same name. The name pointer is stored in a union with fields that are only used on file-backed mappings, so it does not increase memory usage. CONFIG_ANON_VMA_NAME kernel configuration is introduced to enable this feature. It keeps the feature disabled by default to prevent any additional memory overhead and to avoid confusing procfs parsers on systems which are not ready to support named anonymous vmas. The patch is based on the original patch developed by Colin Cross, more specifically on its latest version [1] posted upstream by Sumit Semwal. It used a userspace pointer to store vma names. In that design, name pointers could be shared between vmas. However during the last upstreaming attempt, Kees Cook raised concerns [2] about this approach and suggested to copy the name into kernel memory space, perform validity checks [3] and store as a string referenced from vm_area_struct. One big concern is about fork() performance which would need to strdup anonymous vma names. Dave Hansen suggested experimenting with worst-case scenario of forking a process with 64k vmas having longest possible names [4]. I ran this experiment on an ARM64 Android device and recorded a worst-case regression of almost 40% when forking such a process. This regression is addressed in the followup patch which replaces the pointer to a name with a refcounted structure that allows sharing the name pointer between vmas of the same name. Instead of duplicating the string during fork() or when splitting a vma it increments the refcount. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20200901161459.11772-4-sumit.semwal@linaro.org/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/202009031031.D32EF57ED@keescook/ [3] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/202009031022.3834F692@keescook/ [4] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/5d0358ab-8c47-2f5f-8e43-23b89d6a8e95@intel.com/ Changes for prctl(2) manual page (in the options section): PR_SET_VMA Sets an attribute specified in arg2 for virtual memory areas starting from the address specified in arg3 and spanning the size specified in arg4. arg5 specifies the value of the attribute to be set. Note that assigning an attribute to a virtual memory area might prevent it from being merged with adjacent virtual memory areas due to the difference in that attribute's value. Currently, arg2 must be one of: PR_SET_VMA_ANON_NAME Set a name for anonymous virtual memory areas. arg5 should be a pointer to a null-terminated string containing the name. The name length including null byte cannot exceed 80 bytes. If arg5 is NULL, the name of the appropriate anonymous virtual memory areas will be reset. The name can contain only printable ascii characters (including space), except '[',']','\','$' and '`'. This feature is available only if the kernel is built with the CONFIG_ANON_VMA_NAME option enabled. [surenb@google.com: docs: proc.rst: /proc/PID/maps: fix malformed table] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20211123185928.2513763-1-surenb@google.com [surenb: rebased over v5.15-rc6, replaced userpointer with a kernel copy, added input sanitization and CONFIG_ANON_VMA_NAME config. The bulk of the work here was done by Colin Cross, therefore, with his permission, keeping him as the author] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20211019215511.3771969-2-surenb@google.com Signed-off-by: Colin Cross <ccross@google.com> Signed-off-by: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com> Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> Cc: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au> Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Cc: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@openvz.org> Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> Cc: Jan Glauber <jan.glauber@gmail.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com> Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> Cc: "Serge E. Hallyn" <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com> Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@fusionio.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst6
1 files changed, 4 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst
index 8d7f141c6fc7..061744c436d9 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst
@@ -426,12 +426,14 @@ with the memory region, as the case would be with BSS (uninitialized data).
The "pathname" shows the name associated file for this mapping. If the mapping
is not associated with a file:
- ======= ====================================
+ ============= ====================================
[heap] the heap of the program
[stack] the stack of the main process
[vdso] the "virtual dynamic shared object",
the kernel system call handler
- ======= ====================================
+ [anon:<name>] an anonymous mapping that has been
+ named by userspace
+ ============= ====================================
or if empty, the mapping is anonymous.