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-rw-r--r--Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt14
1 files changed, 12 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt b/Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt
index 56faec0f73f7..3cd38438242a 100644
--- a/Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt
+++ b/Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt
@@ -16,12 +16,17 @@ There are three components to pagemap:
* Bits 0-4 swap type if swapped
* Bits 5-54 swap offset if swapped
* Bit 55 pte is soft-dirty (see Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt)
- * Bit 56 page exclusively mapped
+ * Bit 56 page exclusively mapped (since 4.2)
* Bits 57-60 zero
- * Bit 61 page is file-page or shared-anon
+ * Bit 61 page is file-page or shared-anon (since 3.5)
* Bit 62 page swapped
* Bit 63 page present
+ Since Linux 4.0 only users with the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability can get PFNs.
+ In 4.0 and 4.1 opens by unprivileged fail with -EPERM. Starting from
+ 4.2 the PFN field is zeroed if the user does not have CAP_SYS_ADMIN.
+ Reason: information about PFNs helps in exploiting Rowhammer vulnerability.
+
If the page is not present but in swap, then the PFN contains an
encoding of the swap file number and the page's offset into the
swap. Unmapped pages return a null PFN. This allows determining
@@ -160,3 +165,8 @@ Other notes:
Reading from any of the files will return -EINVAL if you are not starting
the read on an 8-byte boundary (e.g., if you sought an odd number of bytes
into the file), or if the size of the read is not a multiple of 8 bytes.
+
+Before Linux 3.11 pagemap bits 55-60 were used for "page-shift" (which is
+always 12 at most architectures). Since Linux 3.11 their meaning changes
+after first clear of soft-dirty bits. Since Linux 4.2 they are used for
+flags unconditionally.