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authorJeff Dike <jdike@addtoit.com>2007-05-06 14:51:32 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>2007-05-07 12:13:03 -0700
commit3d564047a5f45cb628ec72514f68076e532988f3 (patch)
tree3a4247baed8e66bfe5d159f058a88c1a5b7e7ed1 /arch/um/include/os.h
parentf9d6e5f83b40d8ff73a74d4bba2c5f51d6048b12 (diff)
uml: start fixing os_read_file and os_write_file
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: Jeff Dike <jdike@linux.intel.com> Cc: Paolo 'Blaisorblade' Giarrusso <blaisorblade@yahoo.it> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'arch/um/include/os.h')
-rw-r--r--arch/um/include/os.h2
1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/arch/um/include/os.h b/arch/um/include/os.h
index 394adcded0b..b463170a530 100644
--- a/arch/um/include/os.h
+++ b/arch/um/include/os.h
@@ -144,7 +144,9 @@ extern int os_mode_fd(int fd, int mode);
extern int os_seek_file(int fd, __u64 offset);
extern int os_open_file(char *file, struct openflags flags, int mode);
extern int os_read_file(int fd, void *buf, int len);
+extern int os_read_file_k(int fd, void *buf, int len);
extern int os_write_file(int fd, const void *buf, int count);
+extern int os_write_file_k(int fd, const void *buf, int len);
extern int os_file_size(char *file, unsigned long long *size_out);
extern int os_file_modtime(char *file, unsigned long *modtime);
extern int os_pipe(int *fd, int stream, int close_on_exec);