From 3d564047a5f45cb628ec72514f68076e532988f3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jeff Dike Date: Sun, 6 May 2007 14:51:32 -0700 Subject: uml: start fixing os_read_file and os_write_file This patch starts the removal of a very old, very broken piece of code. This stems from the problem of passing a userspace buffer into read() or write() on the host. If that buffer had not yet been faulted in, read and write will return -EFAULT. To avoid this problem, the solution was to fault the buffer in before the system call by touching the pages that hold the buffer by doing a copy-user of a byte to each page. This is obviously bogus, but it does usually work, in tt mode, since the kernel and process are in the same address space and userspace addresses can be accessed directly in the kernel. In skas mode, where the kernel and process are in separate address spaces, it is completely bogus because the userspace address, which is invalid in the kernel, is passed into the system call instead of the corresponding physical address, which would be valid. Here, it appears that this code, on every host read() or write(), tries to fault in a random process page. This doesn't seem to cause any correctness problems, but there is a performance impact. This patch, and the ones following, result in a 10-15% performance gain on a kernel build. This code can't be immediately tossed out because when it is, you can't log in. Apparently, there is some code in the console driver which depends on this somehow. However, we can start removing it by switching the code which does I/O using kernel addresses to using plain read() and write(). This patch introduces os_read_file_k and os_write_file_k for use with kernel buffers and converts all call locations which use obvious kernel buffers to use them. These include I/O using buffers which are local variables which are on the stack or kmalloc-ed. Later patches will handle the less obvious cases, followed by a mass conversion back to the original interface. Signed-off-by: Jeff Dike Cc: Paolo 'Blaisorblade' Giarrusso Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- arch/um/drivers/random.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'arch/um/drivers/random.c') diff --git a/arch/um/drivers/random.c b/arch/um/drivers/random.c index e942e836f995..94838f4c1645 100644 --- a/arch/um/drivers/random.c +++ b/arch/um/drivers/random.c @@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ static ssize_t rng_dev_read (struct file *filp, char __user *buf, size_t size, int n, ret = 0, have_data; while(size){ - n = os_read_file(random_fd, &data, sizeof(data)); + n = os_read_file_k(random_fd, &data, sizeof(data)); if(n > 0){ have_data = n; while (have_data && size) { -- cgit v1.2.1