[RFC] [PATCH 0/5 V2] Huge page backed user-space stacks

Eric Munson
2008-07-28T19:18:48Z

Certain workloads benefit if their data or text segments are backed by
huge pages. The stack is no exception to this rule but there is no
mechanism currently that allows the backing of a stack reliably with
huge pages. Doing this from userspace is excessively messy and has some
awkward restrictions. Particularly on POWER where 256MB of address space
gets wasted if the stack is setup there.

This patch stack introduces a personality flag that indicates the kernel
should setup the stack as a hugetlbfs-backed region. A userspace utility
may set this flag then exec a process whose stack is to be backed by
hugetlb pages.

Eric Munson (5):
Align stack boundaries based on personality
Add shared and reservation control to hugetlb_file_setup
Split boundary checking from body of do_munmap
Build hugetlb backed process stacks
[PPC] Setup stack memory segment for hugetlb pages

arch/powerpc/mm/hugetlbpage.c | 6 +
arch/powerpc/mm/slice.c | 11 ++
fs/exec.c | 209 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
fs/hugetlbfs/inode.c | 52 +++++++----
include/asm-powerpc/hugetlb.h | 3 +
include/linux/hugetlb.h | 22 ++++-
include/linux/mm.h | 1 +
include/linux/personality.h | 3 +
ipc/shm.c | 2 +-
mm/mmap.c | 11 ++-
10 files changed, 284 insertions(+), 36 deletions(-)