Add a pooling allocator mode based on copy-on-write mappings of memfds.
As first suggested by Jan on the Zulip here [1], a cheap and effective way to obtain copy-on-write semantics of a "backing image" for a Wasm memory is to mmap a file with `MAP_PRIVATE`. The `memfd` mechanism provided by the Linux kernel allows us to create anonymous, in-memory-only files that we can use for this mapping, so we can construct the image contents on-the-fly then effectively create a CoW overlay. Furthermore, and importantly, `madvise(MADV_DONTNEED, ...)` will discard the CoW overlay, returning the mapping to its original state. By itself this is almost enough for a very fast instantiation-termination loop of the same image over and over, without changing the address space mapping at all (which is expensive). The only missing bit is how to implement heap *growth*. But here memfds can help us again: if we create another anonymous file and map it where the extended parts of the heap would go, we can take advantage of the fact that a `mmap()` mapping can be *larger than the file itself*, with accesses beyond the end generating a `SIGBUS`, and the fact that we can cheaply resize the file with `ftruncate`, even after a mapping exists. So we can map the "heap extension" file once with the maximum memory-slot size and grow the memfd itself as `memory.grow` operations occur. The above CoW technique and heap-growth technique together allow us a fastpath of `madvise()` and `ftruncate()` only when we re-instantiate the same module over and over, as long as we can reuse the same slot. This fastpath avoids all whole-process address-space locks in the Linux kernel, which should mean it is highly scalable. It also avoids the cost of copying data on read, as the `uffd` heap backend does when servicing pagefaults; the kernel's own optimized CoW logic (same as used by all file mmaps) is used instead. [1] https://bytecodealliance.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/206238-general/topic/Copy.20on.20write.20based.20instance.20reuse/near/266657772
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@@ -1602,6 +1602,15 @@ version = "2.4.1"
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source = "registry+https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index"
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checksum = "308cc39be01b73d0d18f82a0e7b2a3df85245f84af96fdddc5d202d27e47b86a"
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[[package]]
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name = "memfd"
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version = "0.4.1"
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source = "registry+https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index"
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checksum = "f6627dc657574b49d6ad27105ed671822be56e0d2547d413bfbf3e8d8fa92e7a"
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dependencies = [
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"libc",
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]
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[[package]]
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name = "memmap2"
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version = "0.2.3"
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@@ -3587,6 +3596,7 @@ dependencies = [
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"libc",
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"log",
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"mach",
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"memfd",
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"memoffset",
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"more-asserts",
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"rand 0.8.3",
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