Re: [RFC] Re: Costless huge virtual memory? /dev/same, /dev/null?

[Samuel Thibault]

Matthew Wilcox, on jeu. 13 avril 2017 09:34:11 -0700, wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 06:29:46PM +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > (Ideally we'd be able to take the MAP_HUGETLB mmap flag into account to
> > map a single huge page repeatedly, even lowering the populating cost,
> > but AIUI of the current hugepage support it would be far from easy)
> 
> You could implement ->map_pages instead of (or as well as) ->fault, which
> would lower your costs if that is a concern.

Yes it is a concern.  I was a bit afraid that implementing map_pages
would be frowned upon, and getting in first a simple yet already useful
/dev/garbage would work better :)

I'm fine with doing either.

> I think the eventual intent is that map_pages would be able to
> populate a PMD or even a PUD.

Yes.  Allocating such a big page can be a problem, though.

Samuel