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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@@ -37,6 +37,7 @@ winapi = { version = "0.3.7", features = ["winbase", "memoryapi", "errhandlingap
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[target.'cfg(target_os = "linux")'.dependencies]
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userfaultfd = { version = "0.4.1", optional = true }
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memfd = { version = "0.4.1", optional = true }
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[build-dependencies]
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cc = "1.0"
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@@ -59,3 +60,5 @@ uffd = ["userfaultfd", "pooling-allocator"]
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# It is useful for applications that do not bind their own exception ports and
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# need portable signal handling.
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posix-signals-on-macos = []
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memfd-allocator = ["pooling-allocator", "memfd"]
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