1aab92ec3d
mlock() allows a user to control page out of program memory, but this
comes at the cost of faulting in the entire mapping when it is allocated.
For large mappings where the entire area is not necessary this is not
ideal. Instead of forcing all locked pages to be present when they are
allocated, this set creates a middle ground. Pages are marked to be
placed on the unevictable LRU (locked) when they are first used, but they
are not faulted in by the mlock call.
This series introduces a new mlock() system call that takes a flags
argument along with the start address and size. This flags argument gives
the caller the ability to request memory be locked in the traditional way,
or to be locked after the page is faulted in. A new MCL flag is added to
mirror the lock on fault behavior from mlock() in mlockall().
There are two main use cases that this set covers. The first is the
security focussed mlock case. A buffer is needed that cannot be written
to swap. The maximum size is known, but on average the memory used is
significantly less than this maximum. With lock on fault, the buffer is
guaranteed to never be paged out without consuming the maximum size every
time such a buffer is created.
The second use case is focussed on performance. Portions of a large file
are needed and we want to keep the used portions in memory once accessed.
This is the case for large graphical models where the path through the
graph is not known until run time. The entire graph is unlikely to be
used in a given invocation, but once a node has been used it needs to stay
resident for further processing. Given these constraints we have a number
of options. We can potentially waste a large amount of memory by mlocking
the entire region (this can also cause a significant stall at startup as
the entire file is read in). We can mlock every page as we access them
without tracking if the page is already resident but this introduces large
overhead for each access. The third option is mapping the entire region
with PROT_NONE and using a signal handler for SIGSEGV to
mprotect(PROT_READ) and mlock() the needed page. Doing this page at a
time adds a significant performance penalty. Batching can be used to
mitigate this overhead, but in order to safely avoid trying to mprotect
pages outside of the mapping, the boundaries of each mapping to be used in
this way must be tracked and available to the signal handler. This is
precisely what the mm system in the kernel should already be doing.
For mlock(MLOCK_ONFAULT) the user is charged against RLIMIT_MEMLOCK as if
mlock(MLOCK_LOCKED) or mmap(MAP_LOCKED) was used, so when the VMA is
created not when the pages are faulted in. For mlockall(MCL_ONFAULT) the
user is charged as if MCL_FUTURE was used. This decision was made to keep
the accounting checks out of the page fault path.
To illustrate the benefit of this set I wrote a test program that mmaps a
5 GB file filled with random data and then makes 15,000,000 accesses to
random addresses in that mapping. The test program was run 20 times for
each setup. Results are reported for two program portions, setup and
execution. The setup phase is calling mmap and optionally mlock on the
entire region. For most experiments this is trivial, but it highlights
the cost of faulting in the entire region. Results are averages across
the 20 runs in milliseconds.
mmap with mlock(MLOCK_LOCKED) on entire range:
Setup avg: 8228.666
Processing avg: 8274.257
mmap with mlock(MLOCK_LOCKED) before each access:
Setup avg: 0.113
Processing avg: 90993.552
mmap with PROT_NONE and signal handler and batch size of 1 page:
With the default value in max_map_count, this gets ENOMEM as I attempt
to change the permissions, after upping the sysctl significantly I get:
Setup avg: 0.058
Processing avg: 69488.073
mmap with PROT_NONE and signal handler and batch size of 8 pages:
Setup avg: 0.068
Processing avg: 38204.116
mmap with PROT_NONE and signal handler and batch size of 16 pages:
Setup avg: 0.044
Processing avg: 29671.180
mmap with mlock(MLOCK_ONFAULT) on entire range:
Setup avg: 0.189
Processing avg: 17904.899
The signal handler in the batch cases faulted in memory in two steps to
avoid having to know the start and end of the faulting mapping. The first
step covers the page that caused the fault as we know that it will be
possible to lock. The second step speculatively tries to mlock and
mprotect the batch size - 1 pages that follow. There may be a clever way
to avoid this without having the program track each mapping to be covered
by this handeler in a globally accessible structure, but I could not find
it. It should be noted that with a large enough batch size this two step
fault handler can still cause the program to crash if it reaches far
beyond the end of the mapping.
These results show that if the developer knows that a majority of the
mapping will be used, it is better to try and fault it in at once,
otherwise mlock(MLOCK_ONFAULT) is significantly faster.
The performance cost of these patches are minimal on the two benchmarks I
have tested (stream and kernbench). The following are the average values
across 20 runs of stream and 10 runs of kernbench after a warmup run whose
results were discarded.
Avg throughput in MB/s from stream using 1000000 element arrays
Test 4.2-rc1 4.2-rc1+lock-on-fault
Copy: 10,566.5 10,421
Scale: 10,685 10,503.5
Add: 12,044.1 11,814.2
Triad: 12,064.8 11,846.3
Kernbench optimal load
4.2-rc1 4.2-rc1+lock-on-fault
Elapsed Time 78.453 78.991
User Time 64.2395 65.2355
System Time 9.7335 9.7085
Context Switches 22211.5 22412.1
Sleeps 14965.3 14956.1
This patch (of 6):
Extending the mlock system call is very difficult because it currently
does not take a flags argument. A later patch in this set will extend
mlock to support a middle ground between pages that are locked and faulted
in immediately and unlocked pages. To pave the way for the new system
call, the code needs some reorganization so that all the actual entry
point handles is checking input and translating to VMA flags.
Signed-off-by: Eric B Munson <emunson@akamai.com>
Acked-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
Cc: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
Cc: Shuah Khan <shuahkh@osg.samsung.com>
Cc: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Linux kernel release 4.x <http://kernel.org/>
These are the release notes for Linux version 4. Read them carefully,
as they tell you what this is all about, explain how to install the
kernel, and what to do if something goes wrong.
WHAT IS LINUX?
Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by
Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across
the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.
It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix,
including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand
loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management,
and multistack networking including IPv4 and IPv6.
It is distributed under the GNU General Public License - see the
accompanying COPYING file for more details.
ON WHAT HARDWARE DOES IT RUN?
Although originally developed first for 32-bit x86-based PCs (386 or higher),
today Linux also runs on (at least) the Compaq Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC and
UltraSPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, PowerPC64, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, Cell,
IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, DEC VAX, AMD x86-64, AXIS CRIS,
Xtensa, Tilera TILE, AVR32 and Renesas M32R architectures.
Linux is easily portable to most general-purpose 32- or 64-bit architectures
as long as they have a paged memory management unit (PMMU) and a port of the
GNU C compiler (gcc) (part of The GNU Compiler Collection, GCC). Linux has
also been ported to a number of architectures without a PMMU, although
functionality is then obviously somewhat limited.
Linux has also been ported to itself. You can now run the kernel as a
userspace application - this is called UserMode Linux (UML).
DOCUMENTATION:
- There is a lot of documentation available both in electronic form on
the Internet and in books, both Linux-specific and pertaining to
general UNIX questions. I'd recommend looking into the documentation
subdirectories on any Linux FTP site for the LDP (Linux Documentation
Project) books. This README is not meant to be documentation on the
system: there are much better sources available.
- There are various README files in the Documentation/ subdirectory:
these typically contain kernel-specific installation notes for some
drivers for example. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what
is contained in each file. Please read the Changes file, as it
contains information about the problems, which may result by upgrading
your kernel.
- The Documentation/DocBook/ subdirectory contains several guides for
kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a
number of formats: PostScript (.ps), PDF, HTML, & man-pages, among others.
After installation, "make psdocs", "make pdfdocs", "make htmldocs",
or "make mandocs" will render the documentation in the requested format.
INSTALLING the kernel source:
- If you install the full sources, put the kernel tarball in a
directory where you have permissions (eg. your home directory) and
unpack it:
xz -cd linux-4.X.tar.xz | tar xvf -
Replace "X" with the version number of the latest kernel.
Do NOT use the /usr/src/linux area! This area has a (usually
incomplete) set of kernel headers that are used by the library header
files. They should match the library, and not get messed up by
whatever the kernel-du-jour happens to be.
- You can also upgrade between 4.x releases by patching. Patches are
distributed in the xz format. To install by patching, get all the
newer patch files, enter the top level directory of the kernel source
(linux-4.X) and execute:
xz -cd ../patch-4.x.xz | patch -p1
Replace "x" for all versions bigger than the version "X" of your current
source tree, _in_order_, and you should be ok. You may want to remove
the backup files (some-file-name~ or some-file-name.orig), and make sure
that there are no failed patches (some-file-name# or some-file-name.rej).
If there are, either you or I have made a mistake.
Unlike patches for the 4.x kernels, patches for the 4.x.y kernels
(also known as the -stable kernels) are not incremental but instead apply
directly to the base 4.x kernel. For example, if your base kernel is 4.0
and you want to apply the 4.0.3 patch, you must not first apply the 4.0.1
and 4.0.2 patches. Similarly, if you are running kernel version 4.0.2 and
want to jump to 4.0.3, you must first reverse the 4.0.2 patch (that is,
patch -R) _before_ applying the 4.0.3 patch. You can read more on this in
Documentation/applying-patches.txt
Alternatively, the script patch-kernel can be used to automate this
process. It determines the current kernel version and applies any
patches found.
linux/scripts/patch-kernel linux
The first argument in the command above is the location of the
kernel source. Patches are applied from the current directory, but
an alternative directory can be specified as the second argument.
- Make sure you have no stale .o files and dependencies lying around:
cd linux
make mrproper
You should now have the sources correctly installed.
SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
Compiling and running the 4.x kernels requires up-to-date
versions of various software packages. Consult
Documentation/Changes for the minimum version numbers required
and how to get updates for these packages. Beware that using
excessively old versions of these packages can cause indirect
errors that are very difficult to track down, so don't assume that
you can just update packages when obvious problems arise during
build or operation.
BUILD directory for the kernel:
When compiling the kernel, all output files will per default be
stored together with the kernel source code.
Using the option "make O=output/dir" allow you to specify an alternate
place for the output files (including .config).
Example:
kernel source code: /usr/src/linux-4.X
build directory: /home/name/build/kernel
To configure and build the kernel, use:
cd /usr/src/linux-4.X
make O=/home/name/build/kernel menuconfig
make O=/home/name/build/kernel
sudo make O=/home/name/build/kernel modules_install install
Please note: If the 'O=output/dir' option is used, then it must be
used for all invocations of make.
CONFIGURING the kernel:
Do not skip this step even if you are only upgrading one minor
version. New configuration options are added in each release, and
odd problems will turn up if the configuration files are not set up
as expected. If you want to carry your existing configuration to a
new version with minimal work, use "make oldconfig", which will
only ask you for the answers to new questions.
- Alternative configuration commands are:
"make config" Plain text interface.
"make menuconfig" Text based color menus, radiolists & dialogs.
"make nconfig" Enhanced text based color menus.
"make xconfig" X windows (Qt) based configuration tool.
"make gconfig" X windows (GTK+) based configuration tool.
"make oldconfig" Default all questions based on the contents of
your existing ./.config file and asking about
new config symbols.
"make silentoldconfig"
Like above, but avoids cluttering the screen
with questions already answered.
Additionally updates the dependencies.
"make olddefconfig"
Like above, but sets new symbols to their default
values without prompting.
"make defconfig" Create a ./.config file by using the default
symbol values from either arch/$ARCH/defconfig
or arch/$ARCH/configs/${PLATFORM}_defconfig,
depending on the architecture.
"make ${PLATFORM}_defconfig"
Create a ./.config file by using the default
symbol values from
arch/$ARCH/configs/${PLATFORM}_defconfig.
Use "make help" to get a list of all available
platforms of your architecture.
"make allyesconfig"
Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
values to 'y' as much as possible.
"make allmodconfig"
Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
values to 'm' as much as possible.
"make allnoconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
values to 'n' as much as possible.
"make randconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
values to random values.
"make localmodconfig" Create a config based on current config and
loaded modules (lsmod). Disables any module
option that is not needed for the loaded modules.
To create a localmodconfig for another machine,
store the lsmod of that machine into a file
and pass it in as a LSMOD parameter.
target$ lsmod > /tmp/mylsmod
target$ scp /tmp/mylsmod host:/tmp
host$ make LSMOD=/tmp/mylsmod localmodconfig
The above also works when cross compiling.
"make localyesconfig" Similar to localmodconfig, except it will convert
all module options to built in (=y) options.
You can find more information on using the Linux kernel config tools
in Documentation/kbuild/kconfig.txt.
- NOTES on "make config":
- Having unnecessary drivers will make the kernel bigger, and can
under some circumstances lead to problems: probing for a
nonexistent controller card may confuse your other controllers
- Compiling the kernel with "Processor type" set higher than 386
will result in a kernel that does NOT work on a 386. The
kernel will detect this on bootup, and give up.
- A kernel with math-emulation compiled in will still use the
coprocessor if one is present: the math emulation will just
never get used in that case. The kernel will be slightly larger,
but will work on different machines regardless of whether they
have a math coprocessor or not.
- The "kernel hacking" configuration details usually result in a
bigger or slower kernel (or both), and can even make the kernel
less stable by configuring some routines to actively try to
break bad code to find kernel problems (kmalloc()). Thus you
should probably answer 'n' to the questions for "development",
"experimental", or "debugging" features.
COMPILING the kernel:
- Make sure you have at least gcc 3.2 available.
For more information, refer to Documentation/Changes.
Please note that you can still run a.out user programs with this kernel.
- Do a "make" to create a compressed kernel image. It is also
possible to do "make install" if you have lilo installed to suit the
kernel makefiles, but you may want to check your particular lilo setup first.
To do the actual install, you have to be root, but none of the normal
build should require that. Don't take the name of root in vain.
- If you configured any of the parts of the kernel as `modules', you
will also have to do "make modules_install".
- Verbose kernel compile/build output:
Normally, the kernel build system runs in a fairly quiet mode (but not
totally silent). However, sometimes you or other kernel developers need
to see compile, link, or other commands exactly as they are executed.
For this, use "verbose" build mode. This is done by inserting
"V=1" in the "make" command. E.g.:
make V=1 all
To have the build system also tell the reason for the rebuild of each
target, use "V=2". The default is "V=0".
- Keep a backup kernel handy in case something goes wrong. This is
especially true for the development releases, since each new release
contains new code which has not been debugged. Make sure you keep a
backup of the modules corresponding to that kernel, as well. If you
are installing a new kernel with the same version number as your
working kernel, make a backup of your modules directory before you
do a "make modules_install".
Alternatively, before compiling, use the kernel config option
"LOCALVERSION" to append a unique suffix to the regular kernel version.
LOCALVERSION can be set in the "General Setup" menu.
- In order to boot your new kernel, you'll need to copy the kernel
image (e.g. .../linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage after compilation)
to the place where your regular bootable kernel is found.
- Booting a kernel directly from a floppy without the assistance of a
bootloader such as LILO, is no longer supported.
If you boot Linux from the hard drive, chances are you use LILO, which
uses the kernel image as specified in the file /etc/lilo.conf. The
kernel image file is usually /vmlinuz, /boot/vmlinuz, /bzImage or
/boot/bzImage. To use the new kernel, save a copy of the old image
and copy the new image over the old one. Then, you MUST RERUN LILO
to update the loading map!! If you don't, you won't be able to boot
the new kernel image.
Reinstalling LILO is usually a matter of running /sbin/lilo.
You may wish to edit /etc/lilo.conf to specify an entry for your
old kernel image (say, /vmlinux.old) in case the new one does not
work. See the LILO docs for more information.
After reinstalling LILO, you should be all set. Shutdown the system,
reboot, and enjoy!
If you ever need to change the default root device, video mode,
ramdisk size, etc. in the kernel image, use the 'rdev' program (or
alternatively the LILO boot options when appropriate). No need to
recompile the kernel to change these parameters.
- Reboot with the new kernel and enjoy.
IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG:
- If you have problems that seem to be due to kernel bugs, please check
the file MAINTAINERS to see if there is a particular person associated
with the part of the kernel that you are having trouble with. If there
isn't anyone listed there, then the second best thing is to mail
them to me (torvalds@linux-foundation.org), and possibly to any other
relevant mailing-list or to the newsgroup.
- In all bug-reports, *please* tell what kernel you are talking about,
how to duplicate the problem, and what your setup is (use your common
sense). If the problem is new, tell me so, and if the problem is
old, please try to tell me when you first noticed it.
- If the bug results in a message like
unable to handle kernel paging request at address C0000010
Oops: 0002
EIP: 0010:XXXXXXXX
eax: xxxxxxxx ebx: xxxxxxxx ecx: xxxxxxxx edx: xxxxxxxx
esi: xxxxxxxx edi: xxxxxxxx ebp: xxxxxxxx
ds: xxxx es: xxxx fs: xxxx gs: xxxx
Pid: xx, process nr: xx
xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx
or similar kernel debugging information on your screen or in your
system log, please duplicate it *exactly*. The dump may look
incomprehensible to you, but it does contain information that may
help debugging the problem. The text above the dump is also
important: it tells something about why the kernel dumped code (in
the above example, it's due to a bad kernel pointer). More information
on making sense of the dump is in Documentation/oops-tracing.txt
- If you compiled the kernel with CONFIG_KALLSYMS you can send the dump
as is, otherwise you will have to use the "ksymoops" program to make
sense of the dump (but compiling with CONFIG_KALLSYMS is usually preferred).
This utility can be downloaded from
ftp://ftp.<country>.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/ksymoops/ .
Alternatively, you can do the dump lookup by hand:
- In debugging dumps like the above, it helps enormously if you can
look up what the EIP value means. The hex value as such doesn't help
me or anybody else very much: it will depend on your particular
kernel setup. What you should do is take the hex value from the EIP
line (ignore the "0010:"), and look it up in the kernel namelist to
see which kernel function contains the offending address.
To find out the kernel function name, you'll need to find the system
binary associated with the kernel that exhibited the symptom. This is
the file 'linux/vmlinux'. To extract the namelist and match it against
the EIP from the kernel crash, do:
nm vmlinux | sort | less
This will give you a list of kernel addresses sorted in ascending
order, from which it is simple to find the function that contains the
offending address. Note that the address given by the kernel
debugging messages will not necessarily match exactly with the
function addresses (in fact, that is very unlikely), so you can't
just 'grep' the list: the list will, however, give you the starting
point of each kernel function, so by looking for the function that
has a starting address lower than the one you are searching for but
is followed by a function with a higher address you will find the one
you want. In fact, it may be a good idea to include a bit of
"context" in your problem report, giving a few lines around the
interesting one.
If you for some reason cannot do the above (you have a pre-compiled
kernel image or similar), telling me as much about your setup as
possible will help. Please read the REPORTING-BUGS document for details.
- Alternatively, you can use gdb on a running kernel. (read-only; i.e. you
cannot change values or set break points.) To do this, first compile the
kernel with -g; edit arch/i386/Makefile appropriately, then do a "make
clean". You'll also need to enable CONFIG_PROC_FS (via "make config").
After you've rebooted with the new kernel, do "gdb vmlinux /proc/kcore".
You can now use all the usual gdb commands. The command to look up the
point where your system crashed is "l *0xXXXXXXXX". (Replace the XXXes
with the EIP value.)
gdb'ing a non-running kernel currently fails because gdb (wrongly)
disregards the starting offset for which the kernel is compiled.