[PATCH 0/3] RFC: Implement MemoryWorkingSetExInformation.

[Andrew Wesie]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 8:31 PM Andrew Wesie <awesie at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 8:07 PM Ken Thomases <ken at codeweavers.com> wrote:
> >
> > Are the semantics of the fields of MEMORY_WORKING_SET_EX_BLOCK documented or explained somewhere?  It's hard to comment intelligently without that.
> >
>
> Not really. My knowledge is limited to what my test has shown:
>  - Demand-zero page is "Invalid"
>  - Once you read from a demand-zero page (or write to it), it is now "Valid"
>  - If you change a page protection to NOACCESS or GUARD, it is "Invalid"
>  - If you change a page protection from NOACCESS or GUARD to
> READ_ONLY, READWRITE, ... without GUARD, it is still "Invalid"
>  - If you then read from that page (or write to it), it is now "Valid"
>

One additional hint that I just found in VirtualQuery documentation
is: "To detect whether copy-on-write has occurred for a specific page,
either access the page or lock it using the VirtualLock function to
make sure the page is resident in memory, then use the
QueryWorkingSetEx function ...".

This seems to imply that when pages are mapped into a process, they
are not resident (e.g. "Valid") until they are accessed or locked.
Additionally, from my previous email, pages become non-resident when
their protection changes to PAGE_NOACCESS or PAGE_GUARD. The page will
then only become resident once it is accessed (read or write) again.

The Linux kernel supports the concept of a "soft dirty" bit in the PTE
that is accessible to user space with pagemaps. This is almost what we
need, except it only handles writes and we need it to mark pages on
read as well.

-Andrew