On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 01:16:07AM +0400, Konstantin Khlebnikov wrote:
> This patch adds 256 virtual character devices: /dev/byte0, ..., /dev/byte255.
> Each works like /dev/zero but generates memory filled with particular byte.
Shouldn't /dev/byte0 be an alias for /dev/zero?
I see you reuse ZERO_PAGE(0) for that, but what about all these special
cases /dev/zero has?
> Features/use cases:
> * handy source of non-zero bytes for 'dd' (dd if=/dev/byte1 ...)
> * effective way for allocating poisoned memory (just mmap, without memset)
> * /dev/byte42 is full of stars (*)
>
> Memory filled by default with non-zero bytes might help optimize logic in some
> applications. For example (according to Yury Gribov) Address Sanitizer generates
> additional conditional jump for each memory access just to handle default zero
> byte as '0x8' to avoid memset`ing huge shadow memory map at the beginning.
> In this case allocating memory via mapping /dev/byte8 will reduce size and
> overhead of instrumented code without adding any memory usage overhead.
>
> /dev/byteX devices have the same performance optimizations like /dev/zero.
> Shared read-only pages are allocated lazily at the first request and freed by
> the memory shrinker (design inspired by huge-zero-page). Private mappings are
> organized as normal anonymous mappings with special page-fault handler which
> allocates, initializes and installs pages like do_anonymous_page().
>
> Unlike to /dev/zero shared ro-pages are installed into PTEs as normal pages and
> accounted into file-RSS: vm_normal_page() allows only zero-page to be installed
> as 'special'. This difference is fixable, but I don't see why it's matters.
One thing that could surprise is unexpectedly big core dump files caused
by /dev/byteX mappings. We have special handling for FOLL_DUMP && zero_page.
Not sure if /dev/byteX should be handled this way too.
> This patch also (mostly) implements effective non-zero-filled shmem/tmpfs files,
> (they are used for shared mappings) but here is no interface for the userspace.
> This feature mught be exported as ioctl or fcntl call.
>
> Signed-off-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov <koct9i@xxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Alexandr Andreev <aandreev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Vassili Karpov <av1474@xxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Yury Gribov <y.gribov@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> drivers/char/Kconfig | 7 +
> drivers/char/mem.c | 285 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> include/linux/shmem_fs.h | 4 +
> mm/shmem.c | 58 ++++++++-
> 4 files changed, 346 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/drivers/char/Kconfig b/drivers/char/Kconfig
> index 1386749..e52cb4e 100644
> --- a/drivers/char/Kconfig
> +++ b/drivers/char/Kconfig
> @@ -15,6 +15,13 @@ config DEVKMEM
> kind of kernel debugging operations.
> When in doubt, say "N".
>
> +config DEVBYTES
I don't think we want new option for this.
> + bool "Byte generating devices"
> + depends on SHMEM
> + help
> + This option adds 256 virual devices similar to /dev/zero,
> + one for each byte value: /dev/byte0, /dev/byte1, ..., /dev/byte255.
> +
...
> +static ssize_t byte_read(struct file *file, char __user *buf,
> + size_t count, loff_t *ppos)
> +{
> + unsigned byte = (unsigned long)file->private_data;
> + size_t written;
> +
> + if (!count)
> + return 0;
> +
> + if (!access_ok(VERIFY_WRITE, buf, count))
> + return -EFAULT;
> +
> + written = 0;
> + while (count) {
> + size_t chunk = min(count, PAGE_SIZE);
> +
> + if (__memset_user(buf, byte, chunk))
> + return -EFAULT;
> + if (signal_pending(current))
> + return written ? written : -ERESTARTSYS;
> + written += chunk;
> + buf += chunk;
> + count -= chunk;
> + cond_resched();
> + }
> + return written;
> +}
Shouldn't this code be shared with read_zero()?
> +
> +static ssize_t byte_aio_read(struct kiocb *iocb, const struct iovec *iov,
> + unsigned long nr_segs, loff_t pos)
> +{
> + size_t written = 0;
> + unsigned long i;
> + ssize_t ret;
> +
> + for (i = 0; i < nr_segs; i++) {
> + ret = byte_read(iocb->ki_filp, iov[i].iov_base, iov[i].iov_len,
> + &pos);
> + if (ret < 0)
> + break;
> + written += ret;
> + }
> +
> + return written ? written : -EFAULT;
> +}
Ditto.
> +
> +static const struct file_operations byte_fops = {
> + .llseek = byte_lseek,
> + .read = byte_read,
> + .write = byte_write,
> + .aio_read = byte_aio_read,
> + .aio_write = byte_aio_write,
> + .open = byte_open,
> + .mmap = byte_mmap,
> +};
> +
> +static int __init byte_init(void)
> +{
> + int major, minor;
> +
> + major = __register_chrdev(0, 0, 256, "byte", &byte_fops);
> + if (major < 0) {
> + printk("unable to get major for byte devs\n");
Hm. Can we, instead of having 256 devnodes, have one /dev/byte?
User can ask which byte it wants by write() byte to file descriptor before
using it with zero by default.
--
Kirill A. Shutemov
--
To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in
the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM,
see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ .
Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>