[RFC PATCH v2 08/11] ARM64: mm: Swap PTE_FILE and PTE_PROT_NONE bits.

Catalin Marinas catalin.marinas at arm.com
Thu May 16 10:58:48 EDT 2013


On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 10:52:40AM +0100, Steve Capper wrote:
> Under ARM64, PTEs can be broadly categorised as follows:
>    - Present and valid: Bit #0 is set. The PTE is valid and memory
>      access to the region may fault.
> 
>    - Present and invalid: Bit #0 is clear and bit #1 is set.
>      Represents present memory with PROT_NONE protection. The PTE
>      is an invalid entry, and the user fault handler will raise a
>      SIGSEGV.
> 
>    - Not present (file): Bits #0 and #1 are clear, bit #2 is set.
>      Memory represented has been paged out. The PTE is an invalid
>      entry, and the fault handler will try and re-populate the
>      memory where necessary.
> 
> Huge PTEs are block descriptors that have bit #1 clear. If we wish
> to represent PROT_NONE huge PTEs we then run into a problem as
> there is no way to distinguish between regular and huge PTEs if we
> set bit #1.
> 
> As huge PTEs are always present, the meaning of bits #1 and #2 can
> be swapped for invalid PTEs. This patch swaps the PTE_FILE and
> PTE_PROT_NONE constants, allowing us to represent PROT_NONE huge
> PTEs.

I guess we'll never get a huge_(pte|pmd)_file() (but we can shift the
file bits up anyway).

> Signed-off-by: Steve Capper <steve.capper at linaro.org>

Apart from the comments you already got:

Acked-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas at arm.com>



More information about the linux-arm-kernel mailing list