docs: rename Documentation/vm to Documentation/mm

so it will be consistent with code mm directory and with
Documentation/admin-guide/mm and won't be confused with virtual machines.

Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>
Suggested-by: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Tested-by: Ira Weiny <ira.weiny@intel.com>
Acked-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Acked-by: Wu XiangCheng <bobwxc@email.cn>

1 files changed, 33 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/mm/remap_file_pages.rst b/Documentation/mm/remap_file_pages.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..7bef6718e3a9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/mm/remap_file_pages.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+.. _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.