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

From: Aneesh Kumar K.V
Date: Sun Mar 19 2017 - 09:01:29 EST


"Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
>> On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 11:23:54PM +0530, Aneesh Kumar K.V wrote:
>>> "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 ?
>>
>> No, I don't think so. And this implementation doesn't do this.
>>
>> It's safer this way: if an library can't handle high addresses, it's
>> better not to switch it automagically to full address space if other part
>> of the process requested high address.
>>
>
> What is the epectation when the hint addr is below 128TB but addr + len >
> 128TB ? Should such mmap request fail ?

Considering that we have stack at the top (around 128TB) we may not be
able to get a free area for such a request. But I guess the idea here is
that if hint address is below 128TB, we behave as though our TASK_SIZE
is 128TB ? Is that correct ?

-aneesh