docs/vm: rename documentation files to .rst

Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>

1 files changed, 33 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.rst b/Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.rst
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+.. _remap_file_pages:
+
+==============================
+remap_file_pages() system call
+==============================
+
+The remap_file_pages() system call is used to create a nonlinear mapping,
+that is, a mapping in which the pages of the file are mapped into a
+nonsequential order in memory. The advantage of using remap_file_pages()
+over using repeated calls to mmap(2) is that the former approach does not
+require the kernel to create additional VMA (Virtual Memory Area) data
+structures.
+
+Supporting of nonlinear mapping requires significant amount of non-trivial
+code in kernel virtual memory subsystem including hot paths. Also to get
+nonlinear mapping work kernel need a way to distinguish normal page table
+entries from entries with file offset (pte_file). Kernel reserves flag in
+PTE for this purpose. PTE flags are scarce resource especially on some CPU
+architectures. It would be nice to free up the flag for other usage.
+
+Fortunately, there are not many users of remap_file_pages() in the wild.
+It's only known that one enterprise RDBMS implementation uses the syscall
+on 32-bit systems to map files bigger than can linearly fit into 32-bit
+virtual address space. This use-case is not critical anymore since 64-bit
+systems are widely available.
+
+The syscall is deprecated and replaced it with an emulation now. The
+emulation creates new VMAs instead of nonlinear mappings. It's going to
+work slower for rare users of remap_file_pages() but ABI is preserved.
+
+One side effect of emulation (apart from performance) is that user can hit
+vm.max_map_count limit more easily due to additional VMAs. See comment for
+DEFAULT_MAX_MAP_COUNT for more details on the limit.