Thanks for your reply.
On 1/20/24 09:34, Charlie Jenkins wrote:
On Sun, Jan 14, 2024 at 01:26:57AM +0800, Yangyu Chen wrote:
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
Thank you for raising this concern. To make sure I am understanding
correctly, you are passing a hint address of (1<<45) and expecting mmap
to return 1<<45 and if it returns a different address you are describing
mmap as failing? If you want an address that is in the sv48 space you
can pass in an address that is greater than 1<<47.
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
In order to force mmap to return the address provided you must use
MAP_FIXED. Otherwise, the address is a "hint" and has no guarantees. The
hint address on riscv is used to mean "don't give me an address that
uses more bits than this". This behavior is not unique to riscv, arm64
and powerpc use a similar scheme. In arch/arm64/include/asm/processor.h
there is the following code:
#define arch_get_mmap_base(addr, base) ((addr > DEFAULT_MAP_WINDOW) ? \
base + TASK_SIZE - DEFAULT_MAP_WINDOW :\
base)
arm64/powerpc are only concerned with a single boundary so the code is simpler.
As you say, this code in arm64/powerpc will not meet the issue I
address. For example, If the addr here is (1<<50) on arm64, the
arch_get_mmap_base will return base+TASK_SIZE-DEFAULT_MAP_WINDOW which
is (1<<vabits_actual). And this behavior on arm64/powerpc/x86 does not
break anything since we will use a larger address space if the hint
address is specified on the address > DEFAULT_MAP_WINDOW. The
corresponding behavior on RISC-V should be if the hint address > BIT(47)
then use Sv57 address space and use Sv48 when the hint address > BIT(38)
if we want Sv39 by default.
However, your patch needs the address >= BIT(47) rather than BIT(38) to
use Sv48 and address >= BIT(56) to use Sv57, thus breaking existing
userspace software to create mapping on the hint address without
MAP_FIXED set.
violate the principle of mmap syscall as kernel should take the hint and
attempt to create the mapping there.
Although the man page for mmap does say "on Linux, the kernel will pick
a nearby page boundary" it is still a hint address so there is no strict
requirement (and the precedent has already been set by arm64/powerpc).
Yeah. There is no strict requirement. But currently x86/arm64/powerpc
works in this situation well. The hint address on these ISAs is not used
as the upper bound to allocating the address. However, on RISC-V, you
treat this as the upper bound.
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
- Charlie
