Re: nommu: handling anonymous mmap clearing in userspace rather thankernel

From: Bernd Schmidt
Date: Thu Apr 03 2008 - 07:07:31 EST


Mike Frysinger wrote:

i also expected MAP_UNINITIALIZE to be unacceptable to LKML. and
afaik, there doesnt seem to be a way to distinguish in the kernel
whether the call is coming from userspace or kernel space, so the
memset() call will still be called for the kernel. ideally the code
would read:
if (!kernel && !(flags & MAP_UNINITIALIZE))
memset(base, 0, len);

Have you examined all callers in the kernel whether they can take uninitialized memory? (Your code doesn't match your description btw, so I'm only guessing what you actually want to achieve.)

Really, if MAP_UNINITIALIZE is unacceptable, then that's too bad and we'll carry it as a local patch, but all the other proposed mechanisms are non-solutions because they break an established interface.


Bernd
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