hyperlight-dev / hyperlight-dev/hyperlight

Remove legacy heap region from snapshot

Open
#1,697 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
area/performance lifecycle/confirmed
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
4.7k
Forks
208
Avg merge
1d 7h
Merged PRs (30d)
47

Description

For historical reasons, we have a "heap" region of memory in the snapshot, which is just a bunch of zero-initialised pages that bound the size of the heap. These are, in theory, never read from, only written to (upon which they will get CoW'd anyway), and have no real purpose existing, but bloat the size of the snapshot image. They are also all distinct physical pages when they are implicitly created in from_env (the space for them is included in `SandboxMemoryLayout::get_memory_size()`, so they are created when we make a memory buffer of that size), so the logic that deduplicates pages by GPA does not even work on them.

We should remove this region, and replace it with a VA region outside the snapshot image region that is unmapped by default, and maps to zero when a fault hits it. We can essentially reuse the logic from the stack region for this.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by tracing SandboxMemoryLayout::get_memory_size(), the snapshot image region, and the existing stack-region fault handling. The change is complete when the legacy heap pages are absent from snapshots and the replacement out-of-image VA region is unmapped by default but maps to zero on a fault.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
infrastructure
Issue type
Refactor
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
48/100

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