Re: [PATCH 2.6.15-rc5] hugetlb: make make_huge_pte global and fix coding style

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On Dec 9, 2005, at 2:37 PM, Hugh Dickins wrote:

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, Mark Rustad wrote:

If hugetlbfs could be guaranteed to provide contiguous memory for a file, that could be used in this application. We used to use remap_pfn_range in our driver, but recent changes there made that not work for this application, so I

You're not the only one to have trouble with recent remap_pfn_range changes.
Would you let us know what you were doing, that you can no longer do?
Some of the change may need to be reverted.

Well, our driver had been allocating two 320MB and one 128MB range of memory, each of the three being contiguous. These were allocated by allocating lots of 1MB groups of pages until we got a contiguous range, then the unneeded pages were freed.

These areas were then mapped into the application with remap_pfn_range. We have been running on a SuSE kernel derived from 2.6.5 for a long time where this worked fine, even for gdb to access during debugging. Now that we are moving to a more current kernel, changes were needed mainly to allow gdb to access these shared memory areas.

I had messed with simply taking the large memory by restricting the kernel's memory range with mem=, but gdb still can't get to the pages because it believes that they are for I/O (there would be no struct page in that case).

Given the situation, using hugepages seemed more attractive anyway, so I just decided to go that way and specify hugepages=192 on the kernel command line.

We also have a single page shared between our processes and the driver, but we now use the new insert_single_page call for that, which works nicely. It seemed to me that calling that for the each of the single pages in our 768M of shared memory was silly, so I went the hugepage route, and that proved to be less trouble than I had expected. I feel like things now are really where they should have been all along.

--
Mark Rustad, [email protected]

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