mlock.2: Document that fork() after mlock() may be a bad idea in a RT process

fork() will remove the write PTE bit from the page table on each
VMA which will be copied via COW. As such, the memory is available
but marked read only in the page table and will fault on write
access.  This renders the previous mlock() operation almost
useless because in a multithreaded application a realtime thread
may block on mmap_sem while a thread with low priority is holding
the mmap_sem (for instance because it is allocating memory which
needs to be mapped in).

There is actually nothing we can do to mitigate the outcome. We could
add a warning to the kernel for people that are not yet aware of the
updated documentation.

Signed-off-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>
This commit is contained in:
Sebastian Andrzej Siewior 2016-08-30 10:59:11 +02:00 committed by Michael Kerrisk
parent 46305699f7
commit fb08a0954e
1 changed files with 14 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -350,6 +350,20 @@ settings are not inherited by a child created via
and are cleared during an
.BR execve (2).
Note that
.BR fork (2)
will prepare the address space for a copy-on-write operation. The consequence
is that any write access that follows will cause a page fault which in turn may
cause high latencies for a real-time process. Therefore it is crucial not to
invoke
.BR fork (2)
after the
.BR mlockall ()
or
.BR mlock ()
operation not even from thread which runs at a low priority within a process
which also has a thread running at elevated priority.
The memory lock on an address range is automatically removed
if the address range is unmapped via
.BR munmap (2).