elf: Add glibc.mem.decorate_maps tunable

The PR_SET_VMA_ANON_NAME support is only enabled through a configurable
kernel switch, mainly because assigning a name to a
anonymous virtual memory area might prevent that area from being
merged with adjacent virtual memory areas.

For instance, with the following code:

   void *p1 = mmap (NULL,
                    1024 * 4096,
                    PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE,
                    MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS,
                    -1,
                    0);

   void *p2 = mmap (p1 + (1024 * 4096),
                    1024 * 4096,
                    PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE,
                    MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS,
                    -1,
                    0);

The kernel will potentially merge both mappings resulting in only one
segment of size 0x800000.  If the segment is names with
PR_SET_VMA_ANON_NAME with different names, it results in two mappings.

Although this will unlikely be an issue for pthread stacks and malloc
arenas (since for pthread stacks the guard page will result in
a PROT_NONE segment, similar to the alignment requirement for the arena
block), it still might prevent the mmap memory allocated for detail
malloc.

There is also another potential scalability issue, where the prctl
requires
to take the mmap global lock which is still not fully fixed in Linux
[1] (for pthread stacks and arenas, it is mitigated by the stack
cached and the arena reuse).

So this patch disables anonymous mapping annotations as default and
add a new tunable, glibc.mem.decorate_maps, can be used to enable
it.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/906852/

Checked on x86_64-linux-gnu and aarch64-linux-gnu.
Reviewed-by: DJ Delorie <dj@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 4580fe381d..139cfef1b0 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -38,6 +38,11 @@ Major new features:
   and the wfN format length modifiers for arguments pointing to types
   int_fastN_t or uint_fastN_t, as specified in draft ISO C2X.
 
+* A new tunable, glibc.mem.decorate_maps, can be used to add additional
+  information on underlying memory allocated by the glibc (for instance,
+  on thread stack created by pthread_create or memory allocated by
+  malloc).
+
 Deprecated and removed features, and other changes affecting compatibility:
 
 * The ldconfig program now skips file names containing ';' or ending in