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authorBenjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>2007-05-08 16:27:27 +1000
committerPaul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>2007-05-09 16:35:00 +1000
commitd0f13e3c20b6fb73ccb467bdca97fa7cf5a574cd (patch)
treea2de01a21dbb28449893102742e6b516a519c03e /Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt
parent16f1c746755836aa823658000493cdab8ce7b098 (diff)
[POWERPC] Introduce address space "slices"
The basic issue is to be able to do what hugetlbfs does but with different page sizes for some other special filesystems; more specifically, my need is: - Huge pages - SPE local store mappings using 64K pages on a 4K base page size kernel on Cell - Some special 4K segments in 64K-page kernels for mapping a dodgy type of powerpc-specific infiniband hardware that requires 4K MMU mappings for various reasons I won't explain here. The main issues are: - To maintain/keep track of the page size per "segment" (as we can only have one page size per segment on powerpc, which are 256MB divisions of the address space). - To make sure special mappings stay within their allotted "segments" (including MAP_FIXED crap) - To make sure everybody else doesn't mmap/brk/grow_stack into a "segment" that is used for a special mapping Some of the necessary mechanisms to handle that were present in the hugetlbfs code, but mostly in ways not suitable for anything else. The patch relies on some changes to the generic get_unmapped_area() that just got merged. It still hijacks hugetlb callbacks here or there as the generic code hasn't been entirely cleaned up yet but that shouldn't be a problem. So what is a slice ? Well, I re-used the mechanism used formerly by our hugetlbfs implementation which divides the address space in "meta-segments" which I called "slices". The division is done using 256MB slices below 4G, and 1T slices above. Thus the address space is divided currently into 16 "low" slices and 16 "high" slices. (Special case: high slice 0 is the area between 4G and 1T). Doing so simplifies significantly the tracking of segments and avoids having to keep track of all the 256MB segments in the address space. While I used the "concepts" of hugetlbfs, I mostly re-implemented everything in a more generic way and "ported" hugetlbfs to it. Slices can have an associated page size, which is encoded in the mmu context and used by the SLB miss handler to set the segment sizes. The hash code currently doesn't care, it has a specific check for hugepages, though I might add a mechanism to provide per-slice hash mapping functions in the future. The slice code provide a pair of "generic" get_unmapped_area() (bottomup and topdown) functions that should work with any slice size. There is some trickiness here so I would appreciate people to have a look at the implementation of these and let me know if I got something wrong. Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
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