Re: [PATCH RFC v3 1/2] mm: Add personality flag to limit address to 47 bits

Arnd Bergmann
2024-09-06T07:18:05Z

On Thu, Sep 5, 2024, at 21:15, Charlie Jenkins wrote:
> Create a personality flag ADDR_LIMIT_47BIT to support applications
> that wish to transition from running in environments that support at
> most 47-bit VAs to environments that support larger VAs. This
> personality can be set to cause all allocations to be below the 47-bit
> boundary. Using MAP_FIXED with mmap() will bypass this restriction.
>
> Signed-off-by: Charlie Jenkins <charlie@rivosinc.com>

I think having an architecture-independent mechanism to limit the size
of the 64-bit address space is useful in general, and we've discussed
the same thing for arm64 in the past, though we have not actually
reached an agreement on the ABI previously.

> @@ -22,6 +22,7 @@ enum {
> WHOLE_SECONDS = 0x2000000,
> STICKY_TIMEOUTS = 0x4000000,
> ADDR_LIMIT_3GB = 0x8000000,
> + ADDR_LIMIT_47BIT = 0x10000000,
> };

I'm a bit worried about having this done specifically in the
personality flag bits, as they are rather limited. We obviously
don't want to add many more such flags when there could be
a way to just set the default limit.

It's also unclear to me how we want this flag to interact with
the existing logic in arch_get_mmap_end(), which attempts to
limit the default mapping to a 47-bit address space already.

For some reason, it appears that the arch_get_mmap_end()
logic on RISC-V defaults to the maximum address
space for the 'addr==0' case which is inconsistentn with
the other architectures, so we should probably fix that
part first, possibly moving more of that logic into a
shared implementation.

Arnd