[RFC PATCH v2 00/13] nommu UML

[Lorenzo Stoakes]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 01:18:26PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> Maybe I'm missing something, but where does this discussion about
> killing nommu even come from?  Nommu is a long standing and reasonable
> well maintained part of the kernel, why would anyone want to kill it
> for no good reason?  I know quite a lot of products shipping it.

It's an ongoing maintenance burden, discussions about seeing whether it's
feasible to remove it have been had in multiple places.

I have personally run into issues having to accommodate it on numerous
occasions, as have many others.

I'd be interested to know which products specifically ship this and also
require tip kernel, perhaps this is just a case of my not being aware of
certain architectures?

My impression was that only legacy architectures specifically needed this,
but I'm happy to stand corrected.

Discussion which prompted this is specifically around m68k over at [0].

[0]:https://lore.kernel.org/all/9be80a9f-1587-4e8a-98cb-edf4920e587e@lucifer.local/

>
> Btw, nommu UML certainly sounds interesting to me, at least indirectly.
> I have a project for next year or so for which the linux kernel library
> or something like it would be useful to run an in-kernel workload as
> a user space process if needed.  nommu uml sounds like a really good
> base for that as there basically won't be any userspace that needs
> memory protection to start with.
>
>