Re: [v2 PATCH] arm64: mm: show direct mapping use in /proc/meminfo

Ryan Roberts
2025-11-13T11:29:49Z

On 12/11/2025 17:11, Christoph Lameter (Ampere) wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2025, Ryan Roberts wrote:
>
>> I have a long-term aspiration to enable "per-process page size", where each user
>> space process can use a different page size. The first step is to be able to
>> emulate a page size to the process which is larger than the kernel's. For that
>> reason, I really dislike introducing new ABI that exposes the geometry of the
>> kernel page tables to user space. I'd really like to be clear on what use case
>> benefits from this sort of information before we add it.
>
> One is user space where you want to "emulate" other page sizes and the
> other is kernel space.
>
> The per process page size is likely going to end up
> being a per VMA page size since these address spaces can be shared and the
> VMA is already containing information about huge pages, memory policies
> and other stuff relatd to memory layout. And yes it would be great to have
> an accounting of the page sizes used in a VMA.

See my response to Yang. I suspect my issue shouldn't really be a consideration
for this patch.

>
>
>> nit: arm64 tends to use the term "linear map" not "direct map". I'm not sure why
>> or what the history is. Given this is arch-specific should we be aligning on the
>> architecture's terminology here? I don't know...
>
> Other architectures are already exposing this data via the terminology
> used here. The information is useful for seeing if there is an issue with
> small pages that could be impacting kernel performance. It is surprising
> coming from oter architectures that this information is not readily
> available.
>