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 --- mm/memory.c | 8 +------- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 7 deletions(-) (limited to 'mm') diff --git a/mm/memory.c b/mm/memory.c index 3416b6e018d6..6105f475fa86 100644 --- a/mm/memory.c +++ b/mm/memory.c @@ -3623,13 +3623,7 @@ static int __init gate_vma_init(void) gate_vma.vm_end = FIXADDR_USER_END; gate_vma.vm_flags = VM_READ | VM_MAYREAD | VM_EXEC | VM_MAYEXEC; gate_vma.vm_page_prot = __P101; - /* - * Make sure the vDSO gets into every core dump. - * Dumping its contents makes post-mortem fully interpretable later - * without matching up the same kernel and hardware config to see - * what PC values meant. - */ - gate_vma.vm_flags |= VM_ALWAYSDUMP; + return 0; } __initcall(gate_vma_init); -- cgit v1.2.3-59-g8ed1b