• J
    uml: start fixing os_read_file and os_write_file · 3d564047
    Jeff Dike 提交于
    This patch starts the removal of a very old, very broken piece of code.  This
    stems from the problem of passing a userspace buffer into read() or write() on
    the host.  If that buffer had not yet been faulted in, read and write will
    return -EFAULT.
    
    To avoid this problem, the solution was to fault the buffer in before the
    system call by touching the pages that hold the buffer by doing a copy-user of
    a byte to each page.  This is obviously bogus, but it does usually work, in tt
    mode, since the kernel and process are in the same address space and userspace
    addresses can be accessed directly in the kernel.
    
    In skas mode, where the kernel and process are in separate address spaces, it
    is completely bogus because the userspace address, which is invalid in the
    kernel, is passed into the system call instead of the corresponding physical
    address, which would be valid.  Here, it appears that this code, on every host
    read() or write(), tries to fault in a random process page.  This doesn't seem
    to cause any correctness problems, but there is a performance impact.  This
    patch, and the ones following, result in a 10-15% performance gain on a kernel
    build.
    
    This code can't be immediately tossed out because when it is, you can't log
    in.  Apparently, there is some code in the console driver which depends on
    this somehow.
    
    However, we can start removing it by switching the code which does I/O using
    kernel addresses to using plain read() and write().  This patch introduces
    os_read_file_k and os_write_file_k for use with kernel buffers and converts
    all call locations which use obvious kernel buffers to use them.  These
    include I/O using buffers which are local variables which are on the stack or
    kmalloc-ed.  Later patches will handle the less obvious cases, followed by a
    mass conversion back to the original interface.
    Signed-off-by: NJeff Dike <jdike@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Paolo 'Blaisorblade' Giarrusso <blaisorblade@yahoo.it>
    Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    3d564047
smp.c 5.6 KB