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authorDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>2009-01-08 12:04:47 +0000
committerDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>2009-01-08 12:04:47 +0000
commit8feae13110d60cc6287afabc2887366b0eb226c2 (patch)
treeb3188986faab70e753e00ea8670a11ba8ec844c0 /Documentation
parent41836382ebb415d68d3ebc4525e78e871fe58baf (diff)
NOMMU: Make VMAs per MM as for MMU-mode linux
Make VMAs per mm_struct as for MMU-mode linux. This solves two problems: (1) In SYSV SHM where nattch for a segment does not reflect the number of shmat's (and forks) done. (2) In mmap() where the VMA's vm_mm is set to point to the parent mm by an exec'ing process when VM_EXECUTABLE is specified, regardless of the fact that a VMA might be shared and already have its vm_mm assigned to another process or a dead process. A new struct (vm_region) is introduced to track a mapped region and to remember the circumstances under which it may be shared and the vm_list_struct structure is discarded as it's no longer required. This patch makes the following additional changes: (1) Regions are now allocated with alloc_pages() rather than kmalloc() and with no recourse to __GFP_COMP, so the pages are not composite. Instead, each page has a reference on it held by the region. Anything else that is interested in such a page will have to get a reference on it to retain it. When the pages are released due to unmapping, each page is passed to put_page() and will be freed when the page usage count reaches zero. (2) Excess pages are trimmed after an allocation as the allocation must be made as a power-of-2 quantity of pages. (3) VMAs are added to the parent MM's R/B tree and mmap lists. As an MM may end up with overlapping VMAs within the tree, the VMA struct address is appended to the sort key. (4) Non-anonymous VMAs are now added to the backing inode's prio list. (5) Holes may be punched in anonymous VMAs with munmap(), releasing parts of the backing region. The VMA and region structs will be split if necessary. (6) sys_shmdt() only releases one attachment to a SYSV IPC shared memory segment instead of all the attachments at that addresss. Multiple shmat()'s return the same address under NOMMU-mode instead of different virtual addresses as under MMU-mode. (7) Core dumping for ELF-FDPIC requires fewer exceptions for NOMMU-mode. (8) /proc/maps is now the global list of mapped regions, and may list bits that aren't actually mapped anywhere. (9) /proc/meminfo gains a line (tagged "MmapCopy") that indicates the amount of RAM currently allocated by mmap to hold mappable regions that can't be mapped directly. These are copies of the backing device or file if not anonymous. These changes make NOMMU mode more similar to MMU mode. The downside is that NOMMU mode requires some extra memory to track things over NOMMU without this patch (VMAs are no longer shared, and there are now region structs). Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Tested-by: Mike Frysinger <vapier.adi@gmail.com> Acked-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/nommu-mmap.txt18
1 files changed, 12 insertions, 6 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/nommu-mmap.txt b/Documentation/nommu-mmap.txt
index 7714f57caad5..02b89dcf38ac 100644
--- a/Documentation/nommu-mmap.txt
+++ b/Documentation/nommu-mmap.txt
@@ -109,12 +109,18 @@ and it's also much more restricted in the latter case:
FURTHER NOTES ON NO-MMU MMAP
============================
- (*) A request for a private mapping of less than a page in size may not return
- a page-aligned buffer. This is because the kernel calls kmalloc() to
- allocate the buffer, not get_free_page().
-
- (*) A list of all the mappings on the system is visible through /proc/maps in
- no-MMU mode.
+ (*) A request for a private mapping of a file may return a buffer that is not
+ page-aligned. This is because XIP may take place, and the data may not be
+ paged aligned in the backing store.
+
+ (*) A request for an anonymous mapping will always be page aligned. If
+ possible the size of the request should be a power of two otherwise some
+ of the space may be wasted as the kernel must allocate a power-of-2
+ granule but will only discard the excess if appropriately configured as
+ this has an effect on fragmentation.
+
+ (*) A list of all the private copy and anonymous mappings on the system is
+ visible through /proc/maps in no-MMU mode.
(*) A list of all the mappings in use by a process is visible through
/proc/<pid>/maps in no-MMU mode.