• Kirill A. Shutemov's avatar
    mm: mark remap_file_pages() syscall as deprecated · 33041a0d
    Kirill A. Shutemov authored
    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.
    
    [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix spello]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarKirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
    Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
    Cc: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
    Cc: Armin Rigo <arigo@tunes.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    33041a0d
remap_file_pages.txt 1.53 KB