diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/vm')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/vm/hwpoison.txt | 5 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.txt | 28 |
2 files changed, 33 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/hwpoison.txt b/Documentation/vm/hwpoison.txt index 550068466605..6ae89a9edf2a 100644 --- a/Documentation/vm/hwpoison.txt +++ b/Documentation/vm/hwpoison.txt @@ -84,6 +84,11 @@ PR_MCE_KILL PR_MCE_KILL_EARLY: Early kill PR_MCE_KILL_LATE: Late kill PR_MCE_KILL_DEFAULT: Use system global default + Note that if you want to have a dedicated thread which handles + the SIGBUS(BUS_MCEERR_AO) on behalf of the process, you should + call prctl(PR_MCE_KILL_EARLY) on the designated thread. Otherwise, + the SIGBUS is sent to the main thread. + PR_MCE_KILL_GET return current mode diff --git a/Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.txt b/Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.txt new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..560e4363a55d --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.txt @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +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 plan is to deprecate the syscall and replace it with an emulation. +The emulation will create 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. |
