From 909af768e88867016f427264ae39d27a57b6a8ed Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jason Baron Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:02:51 -0700 Subject: coredump: remove VM_ALWAYSDUMP flag The motivation for this patchset was that I was looking at a way for a qemu-kvm process, to exclude the guest memory from its core dump, which can be quite large. There are already a number of filter flags in /proc//coredump_filter, however, these allow one to specify 'types' of kernel memory, not specific address ranges (which is needed in this case). Since there are no more vma flags available, the first patch eliminates the need for the 'VM_ALWAYSDUMP' flag. The flag is used internally by the kernel to mark vdso and vsyscall pages. However, it is simple enough to check if a vma covers a vdso or vsyscall page without the need for this flag. The second patch then replaces the 'VM_ALWAYSDUMP' flag with a new 'VM_NODUMP' flag, which can be set by userspace using new madvise flags: 'MADV_DONTDUMP', and unset via 'MADV_DODUMP'. The core dump filters continue to work the same as before unless 'MADV_DONTDUMP' is set on the region. The qemu code which implements this features is at: http://people.redhat.com/~jbaron/qemu-dump/qemu-dump.patch In my testing the qemu core dump shrunk from 383MB -> 13MB with this patch. I also believe that the 'MADV_DONTDUMP' flag might be useful for security sensitive apps, which might want to select which areas are dumped. This patch: The VM_ALWAYSDUMP flag is currently used by the coredump code to indicate that a vma is part of a vsyscall or vdso section. However, we can determine if a vma is in one these sections by checking it against the gate_vma and checking for a non-NULL return value from arch_vma_name(). Thus, freeing a valuable vma bit. Signed-off-by: Jason Baron Acked-by: Roland McGrath Cc: Chris Metcalf Cc: Avi Kivity Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- include/linux/mm.h | 1 - 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'include/linux/mm.h') diff --git a/include/linux/mm.h b/include/linux/mm.h index 7330742e797..2de2ddba51d 100644 --- a/include/linux/mm.h +++ b/include/linux/mm.h @@ -111,7 +111,6 @@ extern unsigned int kobjsize(const void *objp); #define VM_HUGEPAGE 0x01000000 /* MADV_HUGEPAGE marked this vma */ #endif #define VM_INSERTPAGE 0x02000000 /* The vma has had "vm_insert_page()" done on it */ -#define VM_ALWAYSDUMP 0x04000000 /* Always include in core dumps */ #define VM_CAN_NONLINEAR 0x08000000 /* Has ->fault & does nonlinear pages */ #define VM_MIXEDMAP 0x10000000 /* Can contain "struct page" and pure PFN pages */ -- cgit v1.2.3