Document its motivation, userspace API, behaviors, and limitations. Signed-off-by: Jiaqi Yan --- Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst | 1 + .../userspace-api/mfd_mfr_policy.rst | 60 +++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 61 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Documentation/userspace-api/mfd_mfr_policy.rst diff --git a/Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst b/Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst index b8c73be4fb112..d8c6977d9e67a 100644 --- a/Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst +++ b/Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst @@ -67,6 +67,7 @@ Everything else futex2 perf_ring_buffer ntsync + mfd_mfr_policy .. only:: subproject and html diff --git a/Documentation/userspace-api/mfd_mfr_policy.rst b/Documentation/userspace-api/mfd_mfr_policy.rst new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000..c5a25df39791a --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/userspace-api/mfd_mfr_policy.rst @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 + +================================================== +Userspace Memory Failure Recovery Policy via memfd +================================================== + +:Author: + Jiaqi Yan + + +Motivation +========== + +When a userspace process is able to recover from memory failures (MF) +caused by uncorrected memory error (UE) in the DIMM, especially when it is +able to avoid consuming known UEs, keeping the memory page mapped and +accessible is benifical to the owning process for a couple of reasons: + +- The memory pages affected by UE have a large smallest granularity, for + example 1G hugepage, but the actual corrupted amount of the page is only + several cachlines. Losing the entire hugepage of data is unacceptable to + the application. + +- In addition to keeping the data accessible, the application still wants + to access with a large page size for the fastest virtual-to-physical + translations. + +Memory failure recovery for 1G or larger HugeTLB is a good example. With +memfd userspace process can control whether the kernel hard offlines its +hugepages that backs the in-RAM file created by memfd. + + +User API +======== + +``int memfd_create(const char *name, unsigned int flags)`` + +``MFD_MF_KEEP_UE_MAPPED`` + + When ``MFD_MF_KEEP_UE_MAPPED`` bit is set in ``flags``, MF recovery + in the kernel does not hard offline memory due to UE until the + returned ``memfd`` is released. IOW, the HWPoison-ed memory remains + accessible via the returned ``memfd`` or the memory mapping created + with the returned ``memfd``. Note the affected memory will be + immediately isolated and prevented from future use once the memfd + is closed. By default ``MFD_MF_KEEP_UE_MAPPED`` is not set, and + kernel hard offlines memory having UEs. + +Notes about the behavior and limitations + +- Even if the page affected by UE is kept, a portion of the (huge)page is + already lost due to hardware corruption, and the size of the portion + is the smallest page size that kernel uses to manages memory on the + architecture, i.e. PAGESIZE. Accessing a virtual address within any of + these parts results in a SIGBUS; accessing virtual address outside these + parts are good until it is corrupted by new memory error. + +- ``MFD_MF_KEEP_UE_MAPPED`` currently only works for HugeTLB, so + ``MFD_HUGETLB`` must also be set when setting ``MFD_MF_KEEP_UE_MAPPED``. + Otherwise ``memfd_create`` returns EINVAL. -- 2.52.0.rc1.455.g30608eb744-goog