mlock()'ing adventure

It’s being a great adventure to lock the X input thread on the memory. I’m touching a lot of things that I’d never imagined before :)

To trace the pages that are faulting when I move the device pointer I’m using my own ultra mega super kernel’s page fault notifier. It’s very simple, but as the things are not always perfect, it needs a little patch in the kernel.

The page fault notifier does (almost) all that I need to trace exactly which piece of code inside X is causing the page faults. So, as I said here, I compare the notifier’s output with the symbol table of X binary disassembled. Believe me, it works!

So I spent a lot of time seeing which address is faulty, searching it on the X code and locking it on the memory. When the variable is global I move it to other ELF section called ‘input_data’. When the fault occurs on the text I move it to a ELF section called ‘input_code’. Then I lock this two sections on the phisycal memory using mlock(). Unfortunately the cursor still lags when the system is swaping to death (I used a simple memory hog to get this state). I’ll show you why.

As expected, the page fault notifier still accusing faults comming from the X process, but the address which these faults occur it’s not shown on the objdump’s output, leading me to not lock it (duhh) . Let me explain what I’m doing to test it.

I start the X with the brand new input thread, I run the memory hog and wait for some seconds until it consumes a lot of memory. So then I stop the hog and register the notifier. All the page fault now will be displayed on /var/log/messages. So I move the mouse – attention: this is the exacly moment where a non-locked X process will search for pages and, as the pages are not in memory, will generate a page fault –. When the input code (and datas) is locked it prints this and all the addresses that you see there doesn’t belong to what objdump shows. So what I should lock?! I don’t know… It shouldn’t prints anything if all the code/text were locked correctly (indeed, when I run the test using mlockall() it doesnt’t prints anything). Also, the same test but without locking anything shows this.

So on, I’m not seeing any differences on the cursor’s movement with or without mlock’ing (but yes when I use mlockall() and also when I use the input thread. Don’t make confusion!)

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