On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 12:47:32PM -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 12:21 -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > > Are we talking about the VMA itself, or the memory backing the VMA?
> > 
> > The memory backing the VMA.  We need to store the page protections
> > that the memory was mapped with as well now that you point it out.  A
> > VMA is not user space visible, which is why we can arbitrarily split
> > and merge VMAs.
> 
> It is visible with /proc/$pid/{maps,smaps,numamaps?}.  That's the only
> efficient way I know of from userspace to figure out where userspace's
> memory is and if it *is* file backed, and what the permissions are.

None of those files exist if PROC_FS is off.

> We also can't truly split them arbitrarily because the memory cost of
> the VMAs themselves might become too heavy (the remap_file_pages()
> problem).
> 
> It gets trickier when things are also private mappings in addition to
> being in a file-backed VMA.  We *do* need to checkpoint those, but only
> the pages to which there was a write.
> 
> There's also the problem of restoring things read-only, but VM_MAYWRITE.
> If there's a high level of (non-COW'd) sharing of these anonymous areas,
> we may not be able to even restore the set of processes unless we can
> replicate the sharing.  We might run out of memory if the sharing isn't
> replicated.

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