Commit 33041a0d authored by Kirill A. Shutemov's avatar Kirill A. Shutemov Committed by Linus Torvalds
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mm: mark remap_file_pages() syscall as deprecated

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-...
parent cf2c8127
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