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

Kirill A. Shutemov
2024-09-09T09:47:08Z

On Thu, Sep 05, 2024 at 10:26:52AM -0700, Charlie Jenkins wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 05, 2024 at 09:47:47AM +0300, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 29, 2024 at 12:15:57AM -0700, 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].

I also saw libmozjs crashing with 57-bit address space on x86.

> > > 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.

You reiterate the argument about "small class of applications". But it
makes no sense to me.

With full address space by default, this small class of applications is
going to *broken* unless they would handle RISC-V case specifically.

On other hand, if you limit VA to 128TiB by default (like many
architectures do[1]) everything would work without intervention.
And if an app needs wider address space it would get it with hint opt-in,
because it is required on x86-64 anyway. Again, no RISC-V-specific code.

I see no upside with your approach. Just worse user experience.

[1] See va_high_addr_switch test case in https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/tools/testing/selftests/mm/Makefile#n115

--
Kiryl Shutsemau / Kirill A. Shutemov