Re: [PATCH 26/26] x86/mm: allow to have userspace mappings above 47-bits

From: Aneesh Kumar K.V
Date: Fri Mar 17 2017 - 16:38:43 EST


"Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On x86, 5-level paging enables 56-bit userspace virtual address space.
> Not all user space is ready to handle wide addresses. It's known that
> at least some JIT compilers use higher bits in pointers to encode their
> information. It collides with valid pointers with 5-level paging and
> leads to crashes.
>
> To mitigate this, we are not going to allocate virtual address space
> above 47-bit by default.
>
> But userspace can ask for allocation from full address space by
> specifying hint address (with or without MAP_FIXED) above 47-bits.
>
> If hint address set above 47-bit, but MAP_FIXED is not specified, we try
> to look for unmapped area by specified address. If it's already
> occupied, we look for unmapped area in *full* address space, rather than
> from 47-bit window.
>
> This approach helps to easily make application's memory allocator aware
> about large address space without manually tracking allocated virtual
> address space.
>

So if I have done a successful mmap which returned > 128TB what should a
following mmap(0,...) return ? Should that now search the *full* address
space or below 128TB ?

-aneesh