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SubjectRe: [RFC PATCH] mm, proc: report PR_SET_THP_DISABLE in proc
On Thu, 15 Nov 2018, Michal Hocko wrote:

> > The userspace had a single way to determine if thp had been disabled for a
> > specific vma and that was broken with your commit. We have since fixed
> > it. Modifying our software stack to start looking for some field
> > somewhere else will not help anybody else that this has affected or will
> > affect. I'm interested in not breaking userspace, not trying a wait and
> > see approach to see if anybody else complains once we start looking for
> > some other field. The risk outweighs the reward, it already broke us, and
> > I'd prefer not to even open the possibility of breaking anybody else.
>
> I very much agree on "do not break userspace" part but this is kind of
> gray area. VMA flags are a deep internal implementation detail and
> nobody should really depend on it for anything important. The original
> motivation for introducing it was CRIU where it is kind of
> understandable. I would argue they should find a different way but it is
> just too late for them.
>
> For this particular case there was no other bug report except for yours
> and if it is possible to fix it on your end then I would really love to
> make the a sensible user interface to query the status. If we are going
> to change the semantic of the exported flag again then we risk yet
> another breakage.
>
> Therefore I am asking whether changing your particular usecase to a new
> interface is possible because that would allow to have a longerm
> sensible user interface rather than another kludge which still doesn't
> cover all the usecases (e.g. there is no way to reliably query the
> madvise status after your patch).
>

Providing another interface is great, I have no objection other than
emitting another line for every vma on the system for smaps is probably
overkill for something as rare as PR_SET_THP_DISABLE.

That said, I think the current handling of the "nh" flag being emitted in
smaps is logical and ensures no further userspace breakage. If that is to
be removed, I consider it an unnecessary risk. That would raised in code
review.

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