mm: soft-dirty bits for user memory changes tracking

The soft-dirty is a bit on a PTE which helps to track which pages a task
writes to.  In order to do this tracking one should

  1. Clear soft-dirty bits from PTEs ("echo 4 > /proc/PID/clear_refs)
  2. Wait some time.
  3. Read soft-dirty bits (55'th in /proc/PID/pagemap2 entries)

To do this tracking, the writable bit is cleared from PTEs when the
soft-dirty bit is.  Thus, after this, when the task tries to modify a
page at some virtual address the #PF occurs and the kernel sets the
soft-dirty bit on the respective PTE.

Note, that although all the task's address space is marked as r/o after
the soft-dirty bits clear, the #PF-s that occur after that are processed
fast.  This is so, since the pages are still mapped to physical memory,
and thus all the kernel does is finds this fact out and puts back
writable, dirty and soft-dirty bits on the PTE.

Another thing to note, is that when mremap moves PTEs they are marked
with soft-dirty as well, since from the user perspective mremap modifies
the virtual memory at mremap's new address.

Signed-off-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Cc: Xiao Guangrong <xiaoguangrong@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Glauber Costa <glommer@parallels.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>
Cc: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/Kconfig b/mm/Kconfig
index f5e698e..7e28ecf 100644
--- a/mm/Kconfig
+++ b/mm/Kconfig
@@ -477,3 +477,15 @@ config FRONTSWAP
 	  and swap data is stored as normal on the matching swap device.
 
 	  If unsure, say Y to enable frontswap.
+
+config MEM_SOFT_DIRTY
+	bool "Track memory changes"
+	depends on CHECKPOINT_RESTORE && HAVE_ARCH_SOFT_DIRTY
+	select PROC_PAGE_MONITOR
+	help
+	  This option enables memory changes tracking by introducing a
+	  soft-dirty bit on pte-s. This bit it set when someone writes
+	  into a page just as regular dirty bit, but unlike the latter
+	  it can be cleared by hands.
+
+	  See Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt for more details.