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authorYunhong Jiang <yunhong.jiang@intel.com>2015-08-04 12:17:53 -0700
committerYunhong Jiang <yunhong.jiang@intel.com>2015-08-04 15:44:42 -0700
commit9ca8dbcc65cfc63d6f5ef3312a33184e1d726e00 (patch)
tree1c9cafbcd35f783a87880a10f85d1a060db1a563 /kernel/Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.txt
parent98260f3884f4a202f9ca5eabed40b1354c489b29 (diff)
Add the rt linux 4.1.3-rt3 as base
Import the rt linux 4.1.3-rt3 as OPNFV kvm base. It's from git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rt/linux-rt-devel.git linux-4.1.y-rt and the base is: commit 0917f823c59692d751951bf5ea699a2d1e2f26a2 Author: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de> Date: Sat Jul 25 12:13:34 2015 +0200 Prepare v4.1.3-rt3 Signed-off-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de> We lose all the git history this way and it's not good. We should apply another opnfv project repo in future. Change-Id: I87543d81c9df70d99c5001fbdf646b202c19f423 Signed-off-by: Yunhong Jiang <yunhong.jiang@intel.com>
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+The remap_file_pages() system call is used to create a nonlinear mapping,
+that is, a mapping in which the pages of the file are mapped into a
+nonsequential order in memory. The advantage of using remap_file_pages()
+over using repeated calls to mmap(2) is that the former approach does not
+require the kernel to create additional VMA (Virtual Memory Area) data
+structures.
+
+Supporting of nonlinear mapping requires significant amount of non-trivial
+code in kernel virtual memory subsystem including hot paths. Also to get
+nonlinear mapping work kernel need a way to distinguish normal page table
+entries from entries with file offset (pte_file). Kernel reserves flag in
+PTE for this purpose. PTE flags are scarce resource especially on some CPU
+architectures. It would be nice to free up the flag for other usage.
+
+Fortunately, there are not many users of remap_file_pages() in the wild.
+It's only known that one enterprise RDBMS implementation uses the syscall
+on 32-bit systems to map files bigger than can linearly fit into 32-bit
+virtual address space. This use-case is not critical anymore since 64-bit
+systems are widely available.
+
+The syscall is deprecated and replaced it with an emulation now. The
+emulation creates new VMAs instead of nonlinear mappings. It's going to
+work slower for rare users of remap_file_pages() but ABI is preserved.
+
+One side effect of emulation (apart from performance) is that user can hit
+vm.max_map_count limit more easily due to additional VMAs. See comment for
+DEFAULT_MAX_MAP_COUNT for more details on the limit.