Re: [PATCH v10 0/4] RISC-V: mm: Make SV48 the default address space

[Yangyu Chen]

Hi, Charlie

Although this patchset has been merged I still have some questions about
this patchset. Because it breaks regular mmap if address >= 38 bits on
sv48 / sv57 capable systems like qemu. For example, If a userspace program
wants to mmap an anonymous page to addr=(1<<45) on an sv48 capable system,
it will fail and kernel will mmaped to another sv39 address since it does
not meet the requirement to use sv48 as you wrote:

>	else if ((((_addr) >= VA_USER_SV48)) && (VA_BITS >= VA_BITS_SV48)) \
>		mmap_end = VA_USER_SV48;			\
>	else							\
>		mmap_end = VA_USER_SV39;			\

Then, How can a userspace program create a mmap with a hint if the address
>= (1<<38) after your patch without MAP_FIXED? The only way to do this is
to pass a hint >= (1<<47) on mmap syscall then kernel will return a random
address in sv48 address space but the hint address gets lost. I think this
violate the principle of mmap syscall as kernel should take the hint and
attempt to create the mapping there.

I don't think patching in this way is right. However, if we only revert
this patch, some programs relying on mmap to return address with effective
bits <= 48 will still be an issue and it might expand to other ISAs if
they implement larger virtual address space like RISC-V sv57. A better way
to solve this might be adding a MAP_48BIT flag to mmap like MAP_32BIT has
been introduced for decades.

Thanks,
Yangyu Chen