Re: [PATCH]: Handling spurious page fault for hugetlb region for2.6.14-rc4-git5

From: Hugh Dickins
Date: Wed Oct 19 2005 - 15:29:34 EST


On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Hugh Dickins <hugh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > I was forgetting that extending ftruncate wasn't supported in 2.6.14 and
> > earlier, yes. But I'm afraid the above scenario can still happen there:
> > extending is done, not by ftruncate, but by (somewhere else) mmapping the
> > larger size. So your fix may still cause a tight infinite fault loop.
>
> Will it? Whenever we mmap a hugetlbfs file we prepopulate the entire vma
> with hugepages. So I don't think there's ever any part of an address space
> which ia a) inside a hugepage vma and b) doesn't have a hugepage backing
> it.

The new vma, sure, will be fully populated. But the old vma, in this
or some other process, which was created before the hugetlbfs file was
truncated down, will be left with a hole at the end.

Hugh
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