ksm: support unsharing KSM-placed zero pages

Patch series "ksm: support tracking KSM-placed zero-pages", v10.

The core idea of this patch set is to enable users to perceive the number
of any pages merged by KSM, regardless of whether use_zero_page switch has
been turned on, so that users can know how much free memory increase is
really due to their madvise(MERGEABLE) actions.  But the problem is, when
enabling use_zero_pages, all empty pages will be merged with kernel zero
pages instead of with each other as use_zero_pages is disabled, and then
these zero-pages are no longer monitored by KSM.

The motivations to do this is seen at:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/

In one word, we hope to implement the support for KSM-placed zero pages
tracking without affecting the feature of use_zero_pages, so that app
developer can also benefit from knowing the actual KSM profit by getting
KSM-placed zero pages to optimize applications eventually when
/sys/kernel/mm/ksm/use_zero_pages is enabled.


This patch (of 5):

When use_zero_pages of ksm is enabled, madvise(addr, len,
MADV_UNMERGEABLE) and other ways (like write 2 to /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run)
to trigger unsharing will *not* actually unshare the shared zeropage as
placed by KSM (which is against the MADV_UNMERGEABLE documentation).  As
these KSM-placed zero pages are out of the control of KSM, the related
counts of ksm pages don't expose how many zero pages are placed by KSM
(these special zero pages are different from those initially mapped zero
pages, because the zero pages mapped to MADV_UNMERGEABLE areas are
expected to be a complete and unshared page).

To not blindly unshare all shared zero_pages in applicable VMAs, the patch
use pte_mkdirty (related with architecture) to mark KSM-placed zero pages.
Thus, MADV_UNMERGEABLE will only unshare those KSM-placed zero pages.

In addition, we'll reuse this mechanism to reliably identify KSM-placed
ZeroPages to properly account for them (e.g., calculating the KSM profit
that includes zeropages) in the latter patches.

The patch will not degrade the performance of use_zero_pages as it doesn't
change the way of merging empty pages in use_zero_pages's feature.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: xu xin <[email protected]>
Acked-by: David Hildenbrand <[email protected]>
Cc: Claudio Imbrenda <[email protected]>
Cc: Xuexin Jiang <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Xiaokai Ran <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Yang Yang <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>

Author: xu xin

include/linux/ksm.h

@@ -26,6 +26,12 @@ int ksm_disable(struct mm_struct *mm);
 
 int __ksm_enter(struct mm_struct *mm);
 void __ksm_exit(struct mm_struct *mm);
+/*
+ * To identify zeropages that were mapped by KSM, we reuse the dirty bit
+ * in the PTE. If the PTE is dirty, the zeropage was mapped by KSM when
+ * deduplicating memory.
+ */
+#define is_ksm_zero_pte(pte)	(is_zero_pfn(pte_pfn(pte)) && pte_dirty(pte))
 
 static inline int ksm_fork(struct mm_struct *mm, struct mm_struct *oldmm)
 {

mm/ksm.c

@@ -448,7 +448,8 @@ static int break_ksm_pmd_entry(pmd_t *pmd, unsigned long addr, unsigned long nex
 		if (is_migration_entry(entry))
 			page = pfn_swap_entry_to_page(entry);
 	}
-	ret = page && PageKsm(page);
+	/* return 1 if the page is an normal ksm page or KSM-placed zero page */
+	ret = (page && PageKsm(page)) || is_ksm_zero_pte(*pte);
 	pte_unmap_unlock(pte, ptl);
 	return ret;
 }
@@ -1222,8 +1223,12 @@ static int replace_page(struct vm_area_struct *vma, struct page *page,
 		page_add_anon_rmap(kpage, vma, addr, RMAP_NONE);
 		newpte = mk_pte(kpage, vma->vm_page_prot);
 	} else {
-		newpte = pte_mkspecial(pfn_pte(page_to_pfn(kpage),
-					       vma->vm_page_prot));
+		/*
+		 * Use pte_mkdirty to mark the zero page mapped by KSM, and then
+		 * we can easily track all KSM-placed zero pages by checking if
+		 * the dirty bit in zero page's PTE is set.
+		 */
+		newpte = pte_mkdirty(pte_mkspecial(pfn_pte(page_to_pfn(kpage), vma->vm_page_prot)));
 		/*
 		 * We're replacing an anonymous page with a zero page, which is
 		 * not anonymous. We need to do proper accounting otherwise we