userfaultfd — create a file descriptor for handling page faults in user space
#include <sys/types.h> #include <linux/userfaultfd.h>
int
userfaultfd( |
int flags) ; |
Note | |
---|---|
There is no glibc wrapper for this system call; see NOTES. |
userfaultfd
() creates a new
userfaultfd object that can be used for delegation of
page-fault handling to a user-space application, and returns
a file descriptor that refers to the new object. The new
userfaultfd object is configured using ioctl(2).
Once the userfaultfd object is configured, the application
can use read(2) to receive
userfaultfd notifications. The reads from userfaultfd may be
blocking or non-blocking, depending on the value of
flags
used for the
creation of the userfaultfd or subsequent calls to fcntl(2).
The following values may be bitwise ORed in flags
to change the behavior of
userfaultfd
():
When the last file descriptor referring to a userfaultfd object is closed, all memory ranges that were registered with the object are unregistered and unread events are flushed.
The userfaultfd mechanism is designed to allow a thread in a multithreaded program to perform user-space paging for the other threads in the process. When a page fault occurs for one of the regions registered to the userfaultfd object, the faulting thread is put to sleep and an event is generated that can be read via the userfaultfd file descriptor. The fault-handling thread reads events from this file descriptor and services them using the operations described in ioctl_userfaultfd(2). When servicing the page fault events, the fault-handling thread can trigger a wake-up for the sleeping thread.
It is possible for the faulting threads and the fault-handling threads to run in the context of different processes. In this case, these threads may belong to different programs, and the program that executes the faulting threads will not necessarily cooperate with the program that handles the page faults. In such non-cooperative mode, the process that monitors userfaultfd and handles page faults needs to be aware of the changes in the virtual memory layout of the faulting process to avoid memory corruption.
Starting from Linux 4.11, userfaultfd can also notify
the fault-handling threads about changes in the virtual
memory layout of the faulting process. In addition, if the
faulting process invokes fork(2), the userfaultfd
objects associated with the parent may be duplicated into
the child process and the userfaultfd monitor will be
notified (via the UFFD_EVENT_FORK
described below) about
the file descriptor associated with the userfault objects
created for the child process, which allows the userfaultfd
monitor to perform user-space paging for the child process.
Unlike page faults which have to be synchronous and require
an explicit or implicit wakeup, all other events are
delivered asynchronously and the non-cooperative process
resumes execution as soon as the userfaultfd manager
executes read(2). The userfaultfd
manager should carefully synchronize calls to UFFDIO_COPY
with the processing of
events.
The current asynchronous model of the event delivery is optimal for single threaded non-cooperative userfaultfd manager implementations.
After the userfaultfd object is created with
userfaultfd
(), the
application must enable it using the UFFDIO_API
ioctl(2) operation. This
operation allows a handshake between the kernel and user
space to determine the API version and supported features.
This operation must be performed before any of the other
ioctl(2) operations
described below (or those operations fail with the
EINVAL error).
After a successful UFFDIO_API
operation, the application
then registers memory address ranges using the UFFDIO_REGISTER
ioctl(2) operation. After
successful completion of a UFFDIO_REGISTER
operation, a page fault
occurring in the requested memory range, and satisfying the
mode defined at the registration time, will be forwarded by
the kernel to the user-space application. The application
can then use the UFFDIO_COPY
or UFFDIO_ZEROPAGE
ioctl(2) operations to
resolve the page fault.
Starting from Linux 4.14, if the application sets the
UFFD_FEATURE_SIGBUS
feature
bit using the UFFDIO_API
ioctl(2), no page-fault
notification will be forwarded to user space. Instead a
SIGBUS
signal is delivered to
the faulting process. With this feature, userfaultfd can be
used for robustness purposes to simply catch any access to
areas within the registered address range that do not have
pages allocated, without having to listen to userfaultfd
events. No userfaultfd monitor will be required for dealing
with such memory accesses. For example, this feature can be
useful for applications that want to prevent the kernel
from automatically allocating pages and filling holes in
sparse files when the hole is accessed through a memory
mapping.
The UFFD_FEATURE_SIGBUS
feature is implicitly inherited through fork(2) if used in
combination with UFFD_FEATURE_FORK
.
Details of the various ioctl(2) operations can be found in ioctl_userfaultfd(2).
Since Linux 4.11, events other than page-fault may
enabled during UFFDIO_API
operation.
Up to Linux 4.11, userfaultfd can be used only with anonymous private memory mappings. Since Linux 4.11, userfaultfd can be also used with hugetlbfs and shared memory mappings.
Each read(2) from the
userfaultfd file descriptor returns one or more uffd_msg
structures, each
of which describes a page-fault event or an event required
for the non-cooperative userfaultfd usage:
struct uffd_msg { __u8 event; /* Type of event */ ... union { struct { __u64 flags; /* Flags describing fault */ __u64 address; /* Faulting address */ } pagefault; struct { /* Since Linux 4.11 */ __u32 ufd; /* Userfault file descriptor of the child process */ } fork; struct { /* Since Linux 4.11 */ __u64 from; /* Old address of remapped area */ __u64 to; /* New address of remapped area */ __u64 len; /* Original mapping length */ } remap; struct { /* Since Linux 4.11 */ __u64 start; /* Start address of removed area */ __u64 end; /* End address of removed area */ } remove; ... } arg; /* Padding fields omitted */ } __packed;
If multiple events are available and the supplied buffer
is large enough, read(2) returns as many
events as will fit in the supplied buffer. If the buffer
supplied to read(2) is smaller than
the size of the uffd_msg
structure, the
read(2) fails with the
error EINVAL.
The fields set in the uffd_msg
structure are as
follows:
event
The type of event. Depending of the event type,
different fields of the arg
union represent
details required for the event processing. The
non-page-fault events are generated only when
appropriate feature is enabled during API handshake
with UFFDIO_API
ioctl(2).
The following values can appear in the event
field:
UFFD_EVENT_PAGEFAULT
(since Linux 4.3)A page-fault event. The page-fault details are available in the
pagefault
field.UFFD_EVENT_FORK
(since Linux 4.11)Generated when the faulting process invokes fork(2) (or clone(2) without the
CLONE_VM
flag). The event details are available in thefork
field.UFFD_EVENT_REMAP
(since Linux 4.11)Generated when the faulting process invokes mremap(2). The event details are available in the
remap
field.UFFD_EVENT_REMOVE
(since Linux 4.11)Generated when the faulting process invokes madvise(2) with
MADV_DONTNEED
orMADV_REMOVE
advice. The event details are available in theremove
field.UFFD_EVENT_UNMAP
(since Linux 4.11)Generated when the faulting process unmaps a memory range, either explicitly using munmap(2) or implicitly during mmap(2) or mremap(2). The event details are available in the
remove
field.
pagefault.address
The address that triggered the page fault.
pagefault.flags
A bit mask of flags that describe the event. For
UFFD_EVENT_PAGEFAULT
,
the following flag may appear:
UFFD_PAGEFAULT_FLAG_WRITE
If the address is in a range that was registered with the
UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_MISSING
flag (see ioctl_userfaultfd(2)) and this flag is set, this a write fault; otherwise it is a read fault.
fork.ufd
The file descriptor associated with the userfault object created for the child created by fork(2).
remap.from
The original address of the memory range that was remapped using mremap(2).
remap.to
The new address of the memory range that was remapped using mremap(2).
remap.len
The original length of the memory range that was remapped using mremap(2).
remove.start
The start address of the memory range that was freed using madvise(2) or unmapped
remove.end
The end address of the memory range that was freed using madvise(2) or unmapped
A read(2) on a userfaultfd file descriptor can fail with the following errors:
The userfaultfd object has not yet been enabled
using the UFFDIO_API
ioctl(2)
operation
If the O_NONBLOCK
flag is
enabled in the associated open file description, the
userfaultfd file descriptor can be monitored with poll(2), select(2), and epoll(7). When events are
available, the file descriptor indicates as readable. If
the O_NONBLOCK
flag is not
enabled, then poll(2) (always)
indicates the file as having a POLLERR
condition, and select(2) indicates the
file descriptor as both readable and writable.
On success, userfaultfd
()
returns a new file descriptor that refers to the userfaultfd
object. On error, −1 is returned, and errno
is set to indicate the error.
An unsupported value was specified in flags
.
The per-process limit on the number of open file descriptors has been reached
The system-wide limit on the total number of open files has been reached.
Insufficient kernel memory was available.
The caller is not privileged (does not have the
CAP_SYS_PTRACE
capability
in the initial user namespace), and /proc/sys/vm/unprivileged_userfaultfd
has the value 0.
The userfaultfd
() system
call first appeared in Linux 4.3.
The support for hugetlbfs and shared memory areas and non-page-fault events was added in Linux 4.11
userfaultfd
() is
Linux-specific and should not be used in programs intended to
be portable.
Glibc does not provide a wrapper for this system call; call it using syscall(2).
The userfaultfd mechanism can be used as an alternative to
traditional user-space paging techniques based on the use of
the SIGSEGV
signal and
mmap(2). It can also be
used to implement lazy restore for checkpoint/restore
mechanisms, as well as post-copy migration to allow (nearly)
uninterrupted execution when transferring virtual machines
and Linux containers from one host to another.
If the UFFD_FEATURE_EVENT_FORK
is enabled and a
system call from the fork(2) family is
interrupted by a signal or failed, a stale userfaultfd
descriptor might be created. In this case, a spurious
UFFD_EVENT_FORK
will be
delivered to the userfaultfd monitor.
The program below demonstrates the use of the userfaultfd mechanism. The program creates two threads, one of which acts as the page-fault handler for the process, for the pages in a demand-page zero region created using mmap(2).
The program takes one command-line argument, which is the
number of pages that will be created in a mapping whose page
faults will be handled via userfaultfd. After creating a
userfaultfd object, the program then creates an anonymous
private mapping of the specified size and registers the
address range of that mapping using the UFFDIO_REGISTER
ioctl(2) operation. The
program then creates a second thread that will perform the
task of handling page faults.
The main thread then walks through the pages of the mapping fetching bytes from successive pages. Because the pages have not yet been accessed, the first access of a byte in each page will trigger a page-fault event on the userfaultfd file descriptor.
Each of the page-fault events is handled by the second
thread, which sits in a loop processing input from the
userfaultfd file descriptor. In each loop iteration, the
second thread first calls poll(2) to check the state
of the file descriptor, and then reads an event from the file
descriptor. All such events should be UFFD_EVENT_PAGEFAULT
events, which the
thread handles by copying a page of data into the faulting
region using the UFFDIO_COPY
ioctl(2) operation.
The following is an example of what we see when running the program:
$ ./userfaultfd_demo 3 Address returned by mmap() = 0x7fd30106c000 fault_handler_thread(): poll() returns: nready = 1; POLLIN = 1; POLLERR = 0 UFFD_EVENT_PAGEFAULT event: flags = 0; address = 7fd30106c00f (uffdio_copy.copy returned 4096) Read address 0x7fd30106c00f in main(): A Read address 0x7fd30106c40f in main(): A Read address 0x7fd30106c80f in main(): A Read address 0x7fd30106cc0f in main(): A fault_handler_thread(): poll() returns: nready = 1; POLLIN = 1; POLLERR = 0 UFFD_EVENT_PAGEFAULT event: flags = 0; address = 7fd30106d00f (uffdio_copy.copy returned 4096) Read address 0x7fd30106d00f in main(): B Read address 0x7fd30106d40f in main(): B Read address 0x7fd30106d80f in main(): B Read address 0x7fd30106dc0f in main(): B fault_handler_thread(): poll() returns: nready = 1; POLLIN = 1; POLLERR = 0 UFFD_EVENT_PAGEFAULT event: flags = 0; address = 7fd30106e00f (uffdio_copy.copy returned 4096) Read address 0x7fd30106e00f in main(): C Read address 0x7fd30106e40f in main(): C Read address 0x7fd30106e80f in main(): C Read address 0x7fd30106ec0f in main(): C
/* userfaultfd_demo.c Licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. */ #define _GNU_SOURCE #include <inttypes.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <linux/userfaultfd.h> #include <pthread.h> #include <errno.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <fcntl.h> #include <signal.h> #include <poll.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/mman.h> #include <sys/syscall.h> #include <sys/ioctl.h> #include <poll.h> #define errExit(msg) do { perror(msg); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); \ } while (0) static int page_size; static void * fault_handler_thread(void *arg) { static struct uffd_msg msg; /* Data read from userfaultfd */ static int fault_cnt = 0; /* Number of faults so far handled */ long uffd; /* userfaultfd file descriptor */ static char *page = NULL; struct uffdio_copy uffdio_copy; ssize_t nread; uffd = (long) arg; /* Create a page that will be copied into the faulting region. */ if (page == NULL) { page = mmap(NULL, page_size, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS, −1, 0); if (page == MAP_FAILED) errExit("mmap"); } /* Loop, handling incoming events on the userfaultfd file descriptor. */ for (;;) { /* See what poll() tells us about the userfaultfd. */ struct pollfd pollfd; int nready; pollfd.fd = uffd; pollfd.events = POLLIN; nready = poll(&pollfd, 1, −1); if (nready == −1) errExit("poll"); printf("\nfault_handler_thread():\n"); printf(" poll() returns: nready = %d; " "POLLIN = %d; POLLERR = %d\n", nready, (pollfd.revents & POLLIN) != 0, (pollfd.revents & POLLERR) != 0); /* Read an event from the userfaultfd. */ nread = read(uffd, &msg, sizeof(msg)); if (nread == 0) { printf("EOF on userfaultfd!\n"); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } if (nread == −1) errExit("read"); /* We expect only one kind of event; verify that assumption. */ if (msg.event != UFFD_EVENT_PAGEFAULT) { fprintf(stderr, "Unexpected event on userfaultfd\n"); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } /* Display info about the page−fault event. */ printf(" UFFD_EVENT_PAGEFAULT event: "); printf("flags = %"PRIx64"; ", msg.arg.pagefault.flags); printf("address = %"PRIx64"\n", msg.arg.pagefault.address); /* Copy the page pointed to by 'page' into the faulting region. Vary the contents that are copied in, so that it is more obvious that each fault is handled separately. */ memset(page, 'A' + fault_cnt % 20, page_size); fault_cnt++; uffdio_copy.src = (unsigned long) page; /* We need to handle page faults in units of pages(!). So, round faulting address down to page boundary. */ uffdio_copy.dst = (unsigned long) msg.arg.pagefault.address & ~(page_size − 1); uffdio_copy.len = page_size; uffdio_copy.mode = 0; uffdio_copy.copy = 0; if (ioctl(uffd, UFFDIO_COPY, &uffdio_copy) == −1) errExit("ioctl−UFFDIO_COPY"); printf(" (uffdio_copy.copy returned %"PRId64")\n", uffdio_copy.copy); } } int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { long uffd; /* userfaultfd file descriptor */ char *addr; /* Start of region handled by userfaultfd */ uint64_t len; /* Length of region handled by userfaultfd */ pthread_t thr; /* ID of thread that handles page faults */ struct uffdio_api uffdio_api; struct uffdio_register uffdio_register; int s; if (argc != 2) { fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s num−pages\n", argv[0]); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } page_size = sysconf(_SC_PAGE_SIZE); len = strtoull(argv[1], NULL, 0) * page_size; /* Create and enable userfaultfd object. */ uffd = syscall(__NR_userfaultfd, O_CLOEXEC | O_NONBLOCK); if (uffd == −1) errExit("userfaultfd"); uffdio_api.api = UFFD_API; uffdio_api.features = 0; if (ioctl(uffd, UFFDIO_API, &uffdio_api) == −1) errExit("ioctl−UFFDIO_API"); /* Create a private anonymous mapping. The memory will be demand−zero paged−−that is, not yet allocated. When we actually touch the memory, it will be allocated via the userfaultfd. */ addr = mmap(NULL, len, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS, −1, 0); if (addr == MAP_FAILED) errExit("mmap"); printf("Address returned by mmap() = %p\n", addr); /* Register the memory range of the mapping we just created for handling by the userfaultfd object. In mode, we request to track missing pages (i.e., pages that have not yet been faulted in). */ uffdio_register.range.start = (unsigned long) addr; uffdio_register.range.len = len; uffdio_register.mode = UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_MISSING; if (ioctl(uffd, UFFDIO_REGISTER, &uffdio_register) == −1) errExit("ioctl−UFFDIO_REGISTER"); /* Create a thread that will process the userfaultfd events. */ s = pthread_create(&thr, NULL, fault_handler_thread, (void *) uffd); if (s != 0) { errno = s; errExit("pthread_create"); } /* Main thread now touches memory in the mapping, touching locations 1024 bytes apart. This will trigger userfaultfd events for all pages in the region. */ int l; l = 0xf; /* Ensure that faulting address is not on a page boundary, in order to test that we correctly handle that case in fault_handling_thread(). */ while (l < len) { char c = addr[l]; printf("Read address %p in main(): ", addr + l); printf("%c\n", c); l += 1024; usleep(100000); /* Slow things down a little */ } exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); }
fcntl(2), ioctl(2), ioctl_userfaultfd(2), madvise(2), mmap(2)
Documentation/admin−guide/mm/userfaultfd.rst
in the Linux kernel source tree
This page is part of release 5.11 of the Linux man-pages
project. A
description of the project, information about reporting bugs,
and the latest version of this page, can be found at
https://www.kernel.org/doc/man−pages/.
Copyright (c) 2016, IBM Corporation. Written by Mike Rapoport <rpptlinux.vnet.ibm.com> and Copyright (C) 2017 Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpagesgmail.com> %%%LICENSE_START(VERBATIM) Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual, which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working professionally. Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work. %%%LICENSE_END |