Re: Changing shared_buffers without restart

> On Thu, Mar 20, 2025 at 04:55:47PM GMT, Ni Ku wrote:
>
> I ran some simple tests (outside of PG) on linux kernel v6.1, which has
> this commit that added some hugepage support to mremap (
> https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-mm/patch/20211013195825(dot)3058275-1-almasrymina(at)google(dot)com/
> ).
>
> From reading the kernel code and testing, for a hugepage-backed mapping it
> seems mremap supports only shrinking but not growing. Further, for
> shrinking, what I observed is that after mremap is called the hugepage
> memory
> is not released back to the OS, rather it's released when the fd is closed
> (or when the memory is unmapped for a mapping created with MAP_ANONYMOUS).
> I'm not sure if this behavior is expected, but being able to release memory
> back to the OS immediately after mremap would be important for use cases
> such as supporting "serverless" PG instances on the cloud.
>
> I'm no expert in the linux kernel so I could be missing something. It'd be
> great if you or somebody can comment on these observations and whether this
> mremap-based solution would work with hugepage bufferpool.

Hm, I think you're right. I didn't realize there is such limitation, but
just verified on the latest kernel build and hit the same condition on
increasing hugetlb mapping you've mentioned above. That's annoying of
course, but I've got another approach I was originally experimenting
with -- instead of mremap do munmap and mmap with the new size and rely
on the anonymous fd to keep the memory content in between. I'm currently
reworking mmap'ing part of the patch, let me check if this new approach
is something we could universally rely on.