mm: highmem documentation

Document outlining some of the highmem issues, started by me, edited by
David.

Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@tilera.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 162 insertions, 0 deletions

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+
+                             ====================
+                             HIGH MEMORY HANDLING
+                             ====================
+
+By: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
+
+Contents:
+
+ (*) What is high memory?
+
+ (*) Temporary virtual mappings.
+
+ (*) Using kmap_atomic.
+
+ (*) Cost of temporary mappings.
+
+ (*) i386 PAE.
+
+
+====================
+WHAT IS HIGH MEMORY?
+====================
+
+High memory (highmem) is used when the size of physical memory approaches or
+exceeds the maximum size of virtual memory.  At that point it becomes
+impossible for the kernel to keep all of the available physical memory mapped
+at all times.  This means the kernel needs to start using temporary mappings of
+the pieces of physical memory that it wants to access.
+
+The part of (physical) memory not covered by a permanent mapping is what we
+refer to as 'highmem'.  There are various architecture dependent constraints on
+where exactly that border lies.
+
+In the i386 arch, for example, we choose to map the kernel into every process's
+VM space so that we don't have to pay the full TLB invalidation costs for
+kernel entry/exit.  This means the available virtual memory space (4GiB on
+i386) has to be divided between user and kernel space.
+
+The traditional split for architectures using this approach is 3:1, 3GiB for
+userspace and the top 1GiB for kernel space:
+
+                +--------+ 0xffffffff
+                | Kernel |
+                +--------+ 0xc0000000
+                |        |
+                | User   |
+                |        |
+                +--------+ 0x00000000
+
+This means that the kernel can at most map 1GiB of physical memory at any one
+time, but because we need virtual address space for other things - including
+temporary maps to access the rest of the physical memory - the actual direct
+map will typically be less (usually around ~896MiB).
+
+Other architectures that have mm context tagged TLBs can have separate kernel
+and user maps.  Some hardware (like some ARMs), however, have limited virtual
+space when they use mm context tags.
+
+
+==========================
+TEMPORARY VIRTUAL MAPPINGS
+==========================
+
+The kernel contains several ways of creating temporary mappings:
+
+ (*) vmap().  This can be used to make a long duration mapping of multiple
+     physical pages into a contiguous virtual space.  It needs global
+     synchronization to unmap.
+
+ (*) kmap().  This permits a short duration mapping of a single page.  It needs
+     global synchronization, but is amortized somewhat.  It is also prone to
+     deadlocks when using in a nested fashion, and so it is not recommended for
+     new code.
+
+ (*) kmap_atomic().  This permits a very short duration mapping of a single
+     page.  Since the mapping is restricted to the CPU that issued it, it
+     performs well, but the issuing task is therefore required to stay on that
+     CPU until it has finished, lest some other task displace its mappings.
+
+     kmap_atomic() may also be used by interrupt contexts, since it is does not
+     sleep and the caller may not sleep until after kunmap_atomic() is called.
+
+     It may be assumed that k[un]map_atomic() won't fail.
+
+
+=================
+USING KMAP_ATOMIC
+=================
+
+When and where to use kmap_atomic() is straightforward.  It is used when code
+wants to access the contents of a page that might be allocated from high memory
+(see __GFP_HIGHMEM), for example a page in the pagecache.  The API has two
+functions, and they can be used in a manner similar to the following:
+
+        /* Find the page of interest. */
+        struct page *page = find_get_page(mapping, offset);
+
+        /* Gain access to the contents of that page. */
+        void *vaddr = kmap_atomic(page);
+
+        /* Do something to the contents of that page. */
+        memset(vaddr, 0, PAGE_SIZE);
+
+        /* Unmap that page. */
+        kunmap_atomic(vaddr);
+
+Note that the kunmap_atomic() call takes the result of the kmap_atomic() call
+not the argument.
+
+If you need to map two pages because you want to copy from one page to
+another you need to keep the kmap_atomic calls strictly nested, like:
+
+        vaddr1 = kmap_atomic(page1);
+        vaddr2 = kmap_atomic(page2);
+
+        memcpy(vaddr1, vaddr2, PAGE_SIZE);
+
+        kunmap_atomic(vaddr2);
+        kunmap_atomic(vaddr1);
+
+
+==========================
+COST OF TEMPORARY MAPPINGS
+==========================
+
+The cost of creating temporary mappings can be quite high.  The arch has to
+manipulate the kernel's page tables, the data TLB and/or the MMU's registers.
+
+If CONFIG_HIGHMEM is not set, then the kernel will try and create a mapping
+simply with a bit of arithmetic that will convert the page struct address into
+a pointer to the page contents rather than juggling mappings about.  In such a
+case, the unmap operation may be a null operation.
+
+If CONFIG_MMU is not set, then there can be no temporary mappings and no
+highmem.  In such a case, the arithmetic approach will also be used.
+
+
+========
+i386 PAE
+========
+
+The i386 arch, under some circumstances, will permit you to stick up to 64GiB
+of RAM into your 32-bit machine.  This has a number of consequences:
+
+ (*) Linux needs a page-frame structure for each page in the system and the
+     pageframes need to live in the permanent mapping, which means:
+
+ (*) you can have 896M/sizeof(struct page) page-frames at most; with struct
+     page being 32-bytes that would end up being something in the order of 112G
+     worth of pages; the kernel, however, needs to store more than just
+     page-frames in that memory...
+
+ (*) PAE makes your page tables larger - which slows the system down as more
+     data has to be accessed to traverse in TLB fills and the like.  One
+     advantage is that PAE has more PTE bits and can provide advanced features
+     like NX and PAT.
+
+The general recommendation is that you don't use more than 8GiB on a 32-bit
+machine - although more might work for you and your workload, you're pretty
+much on your own - don't expect kernel developers to really care much if things
+come apart.