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Remove support for userfaultfd #4040
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This commit removes support for the `userfaultfd` or "uffd" syscall on Linux. This support was originally added for users migrating from Lucet to Wasmtime, but the recent developments of kernel-supported copy-on-write support for memory initialization wound up being more appropriate for these use cases than usefaultfd. The main reason for moving to copy-on-write initialization are: * The `userfaultfd` feature was never necessarily intended for this style of use case with wasm and was susceptible to subtle and rare bugs that were extremely difficult to track down. We were never 100% certain that there were kernel bugs related to userfaultfd but the suspicion never went away. * Handling faults with userfaultfd was always slow and single-threaded. Only one thread could handle faults and traveling to user-space to handle faults is inherently slower than handling them all in the kernel. The single-threaded aspect in particular presented a significant scaling bottleneck for embeddings that want to run many wasm instances in parallel. * One of the major benefits of userfaultfd was lazy initialization of wasm linear memory which is also achieved with the copy-on-write initialization support we have right now. * One of the suspected benefits of userfaultfd was less frobbing of the kernel vma structures when wasm modules are instantiated. Currently the copy-on-write support has a mitigation where we attempt to reuse the memory images where possible to avoid changing vma structures. When comparing this to userfaultfd's performance it was found that kernel modifications of vmas aren't a worrisome bottleneck so copy-on-write is suitable for this as well. Overall there are no remaining benefits that userfaultfd gives that copy-on-write doesn't, and copy-on-write solves a major downsides of userfaultfd, the scaling issue with a single faulting thread. Additionally copy-on-write support seems much more robust in terms of kernel implementation since it's only using standard memory-management syscalls which are heavily exercised. Finally copy-on-write support provides a new bonus where read-only memory in WebAssembly can be mapped directly to the same kernel cache page, even amongst many wasm instances of the same module, which was never possible with userfaultfd. In light of all this it's expected that all users of userfaultfd should migrate to the copy-on-write initialization of Wasmtime (which is enabled by default).
It's worth pointing out that this doesn't yet remove the support for paged memory initialization internally because that initialization is a step towards the static memory initialization that copy-on-write uses. I'll file an issue about simplifying that if we move forward with this. |
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👍 With these changes I think we can finally restructure the pooling allocator layout so we can have a single madvise call per instance deallocation (it was originally designed to avoid unnecessary fault handling since they were so expensive from userspace).
FWIW I do think we'll want to measure that before landing it, I think historically I measured that |
This commit simplifies the `MemoryInitialization` enum by removing the `Paged` variant. The `Paged` variant was originally added for uffd, but that support has now been removed in bytecodealliance#4040. This is no longer necessary but is still used as an intermediate step of becoming a `Static` variant of initialized memory (which copy-on-write uses). As a result this commit largely modifies the static initialization of memory steps and folds the two methods together.
* Remove the `Paged` memory initialization variant This commit simplifies the `MemoryInitialization` enum by removing the `Paged` variant. The `Paged` variant was originally added for uffd, but that support has now been removed in #4040. This is no longer necessary but is still used as an intermediate step of becoming a `Static` variant of initialized memory (which copy-on-write uses). As a result this commit largely modifies the static initialization of memory steps and folds the two methods together. * Apply suggestions from code review Co-authored-by: Peter Huene <peter@huene.dev> Co-authored-by: Peter Huene <peter@huene.dev>
This commit removes support for the
userfaultfd
or "uffd" syscall onLinux. This support was originally added for users migrating from Lucet
to Wasmtime, but the recent developments of kernel-supported
copy-on-write support for memory initialization wound up being more
appropriate for these use cases than usefaultfd. The main reason for
moving to copy-on-write initialization are:
The
userfaultfd
feature was never necessarily intended for thisstyle of use case with wasm and was susceptible to subtle and rare
bugs that were extremely difficult to track down. We were never 100%
certain that there were kernel bugs related to userfaultfd but the
suspicion never went away.
Handling faults with userfaultfd was always slow and single-threaded.
Only one thread could handle faults and traveling to user-space to
handle faults is inherently slower than handling them all in the
kernel. The single-threaded aspect in particular presented a
significant scaling bottleneck for embeddings that want to run many
wasm instances in parallel.
One of the major benefits of userfaultfd was lazy initialization of
wasm linear memory which is also achieved with the copy-on-write
initialization support we have right now.
One of the suspected benefits of userfaultfd was less frobbing of the
kernel vma structures when wasm modules are instantiated. Currently
the copy-on-write support has a mitigation where we attempt to reuse
the memory images where possible to avoid changing vma structures.
When comparing this to userfaultfd's performance it was found that
kernel modifications of vmas aren't a worrisome bottleneck so
copy-on-write is suitable for this as well.
Overall there are no remaining benefits that userfaultfd gives that
copy-on-write doesn't, and copy-on-write solves a major downsides of
userfaultfd, the scaling issue with a single faulting thread.
Additionally copy-on-write support seems much more robust in terms of
kernel implementation since it's only using standard memory-management
syscalls which are heavily exercised. Finally copy-on-write support
provides a new bonus where read-only memory in WebAssembly can be mapped
directly to the same kernel cache page, even amongst many wasm instances
of the same module, which was never possible with userfaultfd.
In light of all this it's expected that all users of userfaultfd should
migrate to the copy-on-write initialization of Wasmtime (which is
enabled by default).