looking for help with details of mapping pages to kernel and userspace

From: Chris Friesen
Date: Tue Sep 07 2004 - 12:52:03 EST


I have a box with 1.5GB of memory and HIGHMEM enabled.

I would like to have a page of memory accessable from userspace, regular kernel space, and late asm code on return from exceptions with no valid C context. As far as I can see, this implies that the page tables need to be in lowmem since having to do a kmap_atomic in asm would be painful.

It has been suggested that we could do something like the following, where this is running on behalf of userspace which passed in a desired mapping address:

mypage = __get_free_page(GFP_KERNEL);
SetPageReserved(virt_to_page(mypage));
remap_page_range(vma->vm_start, virt_to_phys((void *) mypage), PAGE_SIZE, vma->vm_page_prot);

This seems to work, but I'm concerned about cleanup. When the task dies, how much cleanup will be done on the page? Does the memory subsystem handle everything, or do I need to explicitly do something like:

reservedClearPageReserved(virt_to_page(mypage));
free_page(mypage);

Is there a better way of doing this? I had considered mmap(), but I think that could give me pages with their page tables up in high memory.


Thanks,

Chris
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