Re: [PATCH v4 1/9] mm: introduce VM_MAYBE_GUARD and make visible in /proc/$pid/smaps

[Lance Yang <lance.yang@linux.dev>]

On 2025/11/18 18:17, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
> Currently, if a user needs to determine if guard regions are present in a
> range, they have to scan all VMAs (or have knowledge of which ones might
> have guard regions).
> 
> Since commit 8e2f2aeb8b48 ("fs/proc/task_mmu: add guard region bit to
> pagemap") and the related commit a516403787e0 ("fs/proc: extend the
> PAGEMAP_SCAN ioctl to report guard regions"), users can use either
> /proc/$pid/pagemap or the PAGEMAP_SCAN functionality to perform this
> operation at a virtual address level.
> 
> This is not ideal, and it gives no visibility at a /proc/$pid/smaps level
> that guard regions exist in ranges.
> 
> This patch remedies the situation by establishing a new VMA flag,
> VM_MAYBE_GUARD, to indicate that a VMA may contain guard regions (it is
> uncertain because we cannot reasonably determine whether a
> MADV_GUARD_REMOVE call has removed all of the guard regions in a VMA, and
> additionally VMAs may change across merge/split).
> 
> We utilise 0x800 for this flag which makes it available to 32-bit
> architectures also, a flag that was previously used by VM_DENYWRITE, which
> was removed in commit 8d0920bde5eb ("mm: remove VM_DENYWRITE") and hasn't
> bee reused yet.
> 
> We also update the smaps logic and documentation to identify these VMAs.
> 
> Another major use of this functionality is that we can use it to identify
> that we ought to copy page tables on fork.
> 
> We do not actually implement usage of this flag in mm/madvise.c yet as we
> need to allow some VMA flags to be applied atomically under mmap/VMA read
> lock in order to avoid the need to acquire a write lock for this purpose.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com>
> Reviewed-by: Pedro Falcato <pfalcato@suse.de>
> Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
> Acked-by: David Hildenbrand (Red Hat) <david@kernel.org>
> ---

LGTM! Feel free to add:

Reviewed-by: Lance Yang <lance.yang@linux.dev>