Re: [PATCH 07/11] unpaged: COW on VM_UNPAGED

Alan Cox
2005-11-18T18:40:36Z

On Iau, 2005-11-17 at 15:52 -0800, David S. Miller wrote:
> The cases I've seen, and am aware of, I documented in a previous
> mail and those involve MAP_PRIVATE maps of /dev/mem or other
> similar fixed page mapping devices.
>
> Which case truly needs COW faults on VM_RESERVED memory which
> isn't an application bug of some sort?

lrmi, X, vbetool, ...

In general these applications want to operate with a copy of the real
bios data mapped into the system. It might be possible to read some of
the data objects (eg the 0x400 page) but it is not possible to read the
BIOS ROM area as it may contain paged segments.

I suspect a read only bios map and an r/w read copy of the bios config
pages might work but the new behaviour is a serious regression breaking
legitimate code so it is problematic when it occurs without a years
warning in the middle of a fairly stable sequence of kernels.