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Michal Hocko authored
PR_SET_THP_DISABLE has a rather subtle semantic. It doesn't affect any existing mapping because it only updated mm->def_flags which is a template for new mappings. The mappings created after prctl(PR_SET_THP_DISABLE) have VM_NOHUGEPAGE flag set. This can be quite surprising for all those applications which do not do prctl(); fork() & exec() and want to control their own THP behavior. Another usecase when the immediate semantic of the prctl might be useful is a combination of pre- and post-copy migration of containers with CRIU. In this case CRIU populates a part of a memory region with data that was saved during the pre-copy stage. Afterwards, the region is registered with userfaultfd and CRIU expects to get page faults for the parts of the region that were not yet populated. However, khugepaged collapses the pages and the expected page faults do not occur. In more general case, the prctl(PR_SET_THP_DISABLE) could be used as a temporary mechanism for ...
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