On Tue, Jan 04, 2022 at 07:28:29PM +0100, Jakub Jelinek via Gcc-patches wrote:
> > > Other issues in the patch are that it doesn't munlock on deallocation and
> > > that because of that deallocation we need to figure out what to do on page
> > > boundaries. As documented, mlock can be passed address and/or address +
> > > size that aren't at page boundaries and pinning happens even just for
> > > partially touched pages. But munlock unpins also even the partially
> > > overlapping pages and we don't know at that point whether some other
> > > pinned
> > > allocations don't appear in those pages.
> >
> > Right, it doesn't munlock because of these issues. I don't know of any way
> > to solve this that wouldn't involve building tables of locked ranges (and
> > knowing what the page size is).
> >
> > I considered using mmap with the lock flag instead, but the failure mode
> > looked unhelpful. I guess we could mmap with the regular flags, then mlock
> > after. That should bypass the regular heap and ensure each allocation has
> > it's own page. I'm not sure what the unintended side-effects of that might
> > be.
>
> But the munlock is even more important because of the low ulimit -l, because
> if munlock isn't done on deallocation, the by default I think 64KB limit
> will be reached even much earlier. If most users have just 64KB limit on
> pinned memory per process, then that most likely asks for grabbing such memory
> in whole pages and doing memory management on that resource.
> Because vasting that precious memory on the partial pages which will most
> likely get non-pinned allocations when we just have 16 such pages is a big
> waste.
E.g. if we start using (dynamically, using dlopen/dlsym etc.) the memkind
library for some of the allocators, for the pinned memory we could use
e.g. the memkind_create_fixed API - on the first pinned allocation, check
what is the ulimit -l and if it is fairly small, mmap PROT_NONE the whole
pinned size (but don't pin it whole at start, just whatever we need as we
go).
Jakub
