Re: [PATCH v10 3/3] mm: add anonymous vma name refcounting

[Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>]

On Wed, Oct 6, 2021 at 10:58 AM Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> > > I can understand that having a string can be quite beneficial e.g., when
> > > dumping mmaps. If only user space knows the id <-> string mapping, that
> > > can be quite tricky.
> > >
> > > However, I also do wonder if there would be a way to standardize/reserve
> > > ids, such that a given id always corresponds to a specific user. If we
> > > use an uint64_t for an id, there would be plenty room to reserve ids ...
> > >
> > > I'd really prefer if we can avoid using strings and instead using ids.
> >
> > I wish it was that simple and for some names like [anon:.bss] or
> > [anon:dalvik-zygote space] reserving a unique id would work, however
> > some names like [anon:dalvik-/system/framework/boot-core-icu4j.art]
> > are generated dynamically at runtime and include package name.
>
> I'd be careful; if you allow special characters like that, you will
> confuse some kind of parser.

That's why I think having a separate config option with default being
disabled would be useful here. It can be enabled on the systems which
handle [anon:...] correctly without affecting all other systems.

>
> > Packages are constantly evolving, new ones are developed, names can
> > change, etc. So assigning a unique id for these names is not really
> > feasible.
> > That leaves us with the central facility option, which as I described
> > in my previous email would be prohibitive from performance POV (IPC
> > every time we have a new name or want to convert id to name).
>
> That "central facility" option can be as simple as "mkdir
> /somewhere/sanitized_id", using inode numbers for example. You don't
> really need IPC.

Hmm, so the suggestion is to have some directory which contains files
representing IDs, each containing the string name of the associated
vma? Then let's say we are creating a new VMA and want to name it. We
would have to scan that directory, check all files and see if any of
them contain the name we want to reuse the same ID. This is while we
are doing mmap() call, which is often a part of time sensitive
operation (for example app is starting and allocating some memory to
operate). App startup time is one of the main metrics our users care
about and regressing that would not go well with our QA team.

>
> Plus, I don't really believe the IPC cost would be prohibitive.

This option was discussed by the Android performance team and rejected
8 years ago. The problem is that these operations are often happening
in performance-sensitive areas of the process lifecycle.

>
> Or you could simply hash the string and use the hash as id...

I don't see how this would help. You still need to register your
hash->name association somewhere for that hash to be converted back to
the name. Did I misunderstand your suggestion?

>
> Best regards,
>                                                                 Pavel
> --
> http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek