On Fri, 27 Mar 2009, Sergey Babkin wrote:
Would not a normal mmap be duplicated on fork? I'd do it as a small
pseudo-= driver
that allows to mmap this page. Then libc would open this pseudo-d=
evice and mmap it,
either in the on-load handler or on the first call of=
gettimeofday(). I think, that should
be it, no special magic nece= ssary.
The per-process is more difficult and would require the magic= :-) Or
maybe
no magic a s such: just mmap the file from the /proc files= ystem.
Then on fork
in the child unmap this page, open the new file, and= map it. vfork
will still be tricky :-)
It also means wasting an extra p= age per process.
Part of the point of mapping in the page at execve()-time, or fork()-time for
per-process pages (which I'm not entirely convinced we need yet) is to avoid
the cost of an extra device open, mmap, etc, for every execve(), which can be
quite expensive. I stuck a prototype page mapped from a special device
exporting time information here a year or two ago:
http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/20080203-evilmem.diff
http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/evilmem_test.c
This doesn't do TSC-based adjustment, just drops a timestamp in from the
callout wheel, but was intended to allow Kris to do a bit of comparative
benchmarking and decide if it might be a viable approach to invest further
work in. Obviously, the above code should never, ever, get near a production
kernel, since it was a 2-hour hack for experimental purposes.
I think the right way forward is to prototype: map the page in at
execve()-time in the kernel and pass the address to rtld via elf auxiliary
arguments, and have rtld link it (via some or another means), exposing symbols
or code or whatever, to libc. If someone wants to make it a dynamic shared
object in ELF-speak, then I'm all for that as it would minimize the work rtld
had to do.
I guess interesting questions are whether (a) it would be desirable to have
per-page, per-cpu, or per-thread mappings. If there are non-synchronized
TSCs, then there might be some interesting advantages to a per-CPU page.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
-SB
Mar 27, 2009 12:51:56 PM, [1]sco...@samsc= o.org wrote:
I've been talking about this for years. All I need is help with =
the VM
magic to create the page on fork. I also want two pages, one gl=
obal
for gettimeofday (and any other global data we can think of) and
on= e
per-process for static data like getpid/getgid.
Scott
Sergey Babkin wrote:
> (Sorry for the top quoting). Probably the= best implementation of
> gettimeofd=3Dy() is to have
> a= page in the kernel mapped read-only to all the user
pr=3Dcesses. Put
&g= t; the kernel's idea of time
> into this page. Then getting the= =3Dime becomes a simple read
(OK, two
> reads, to make sure that<= br>> no update =3Das happened in
between).
References
1. file://localhost/tmp/3D"mai=
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