On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 03:16:21PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote: > > Huh, I thought libc was aware of this. Also, I'd expect a libc-based > > implementation to restrict itself to, eg, only loading libraries in > > the bottom 1GB to avoid applications who want to map huge things from > > running out of unfragmented address space. > > That seems like a rather arbitrary expectation and I'm not sure why > you'd expect it to result in less fragmentation rather than more. For > example if it started from 1GB and worked down, you'd immediately > reduce the contiguous free space from ~3GB to ~2GB, and if it started > from the bottom and worked up, brk would immediately become > unavailable, increasing mmap pressure elsewhere. By *not* limiting yourself to the bottom 1GB, you'll almost immediately fragment the address space even worse. Just looking at 'ls' as a hopefully-good example of a typical app, it maps: linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffef5eef000) libselinux.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libselinux.so.1 (0x00007fb3657f5000) libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007fb36543b000) libpcre.so.3 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3 (0x00007fb3651c9000) libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fb364fc5000) /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fb365c3f000) libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007fb364da7000) The VDSO wouldn't move, but look at the distribution of mapping 6 things into a 3GB address space in random locations. What are the odds you have a contiguous 1GB chunk of address space? If you restrict yourself to the bottom 1GB before running out of room and falling back to a sequential allocation, you'll prevent a lot of fragmentation.
