[PATCH RFC v2 0/4] mm: Introduce MAP_BELOW_HINT

[Michal Hocko]

On Thu 29-08-24 10:33:22, Charlie Jenkins wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2024 at 10:30:56AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Thu 29-08-24 00:15:57, Charlie Jenkins wrote:
> > > Some applications rely on placing data in free bits addresses allocated
> > > by mmap. Various architectures (eg. x86, arm64, powerpc) restrict the
> > > address returned by mmap to be less than the 48-bit address space,
> > > unless the hint address uses more than 47 bits (the 48th bit is reserved
> > > for the kernel address space).
> > > 
> > > The riscv architecture needs a way to similarly restrict the virtual
> > > address space. On the riscv port of OpenJDK an error is thrown if
> > > attempted to run on the 57-bit address space, called sv57 [1].  golang
> > > has a comment that sv57 support is not complete, but there are some
> > > workarounds to get it to mostly work [2].
> > > 
> > > These applications work on x86 because x86 does an implicit 47-bit
> > > restriction of mmap() address that contain a hint address that is less
> > > than 48 bits.
> > > 
> > > Instead of implicitly restricting the address space on riscv (or any
> > > current/future architecture), a flag would allow users to opt-in to this
> > > behavior rather than opt-out as is done on other architectures. This is
> > > desirable because it is a small class of applications that do pointer
> > > masking.
> > 
> > IIRC this has been discussed at length when 5-level page tables support
> > has been proposed for x86. Sorry I do not have a link handy but lore
> > should help you. Linus was not really convinced and in the end vetoed it
> > and prefer that those few applications that benefit from greater address
> > space would do that explicitly than other way around.
> 
> I believe I found the conversation you were referring to. Ingo Molnar
> recommended a flag similar to what I have proposed [1]. Catalin
> recommended to make 52-bit opt-in on arm64 [2]. Dave Hansen brought up
> MPX [3].
> 
> However these conversations are tangential to what I am proposing. arm64
> and x86 decided to have the default address space be 48 bits. However
> this was done on a per-architecture basis with no way for applications
> to have guarantees between architectures. Even this behavior to restrict
> to 48 bits does not even appear in the man pages, so would require
> reading the kernel source code to understand that this feature is
> available. Then to opt-in to larger address spaces, applications have to
> know to provide a hint address that is greater than 47 bits, mmap() will
> then return an address that contains up to 56 bits on x86 and 52 bits on
> arm64. This difference of 4 bits causes inconsistency and is part of the
> problem I am trying to solve with this flag.

Yes, I guess I do understand where you are heading. Our existing model
assumes that anybody requiring more address space know what they are
doing and deal with the reality. This is the way Linus has pushed this
and I am not really convinced it is the right way TBH. On the other hand
it is true that this allows a safe(r) transition to larger address
spaces.

> I am not proposing to change x86 and arm64 away from using their opt-out
> feature, I am instead proposing a standard ABI for applications that
> need some guarantees of the bits used in pointers.

Right, but this is not really different from earlier attempts to achieve
this IIRC. Extentind mmap for that purpose seems quite tricky as already
pointed out in other sub-threads. Quite honestly I am not really sure
what is the right and backwards compatible way. I just wanted to make
you aware this has been discussed at lenght in the past.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs