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Kirill A. Shutemov authored
The remap_file_pages() system call is used to create a nonlinear mapping, that is, a mapping in which the pages of the file are mapped into a nonsequential order in memory. The advantage of using remap_file_pages() over using repeated calls to mmap(2) is that the former approach does not require the kernel to create additional VMA (Virtual Memory Area) data structures. Supporting of nonlinear mapping requires significant amount of non-trivial code in kernel virtual memory subsystem including hot paths. Also to get nonlinear mapping work kernel need a way to distinguish normal page table entries from entries with file offset (pte_file). Kernel reserves flag in PTE for this purpose. PTE flags are scarce resource especially on some CPU architectures. It would be nice to free up the flag for other usage. Fortunately, there are not many users of remap_file_pages() in the wild. It's only known that one enterprise RDBMS implementation uses the syscall on 32-...
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