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Date:      Mon, 28 Jun 1999 12:54:12 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
To:        Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu>
Cc:        "Daniel J. O'Connor" <darius@dons.net.au>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, Ladavac Marino <mladavac@metropolitan.at>
Subject:   Re: RE: Implementation of mmap() in FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <199906281954.MAA24312@apollo.backplane.com>
References:   <Pine.GSO.3.96.990628145553.20294A-100000@sol.cs.binghamton.edu>

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:>     it is extremely memory efficient.
:
:I guess you are talking about VMIO buffers where the pages are found and
:registered into the buffer header during allocbuf().  When we do I/O on
:VMIO buffers using conventional system call method, we specify UIO_NOCOPY
:to instruct the uiomove() do not perform data copy. 

    UIO_NOCOPY is used to handle a degenerate case in the VFS/BIO vs VM
    interaction for I/O, it has nothing to do with the read() or write() 
    syscall per say, nor is it related to the mmap code.

:> Programmers who use mmap() expect it to be as close to optimal as
:> possible. 
:
:I write a program to test the mmap() today. It turns out that a user can
:modify the part of the mmapped area that is within the system returned
:area but not part of the user-specified area. 
:
:As I understand it, there are two access paths to a file: conventional I/O
:through read/write systems calls and memory-mapped I/O.  Both of them
:converge at the vnode read and write routine (VOP_READ() and VOP_WRITE()). 
:This should give us the opportunity to guard against illegal memory-mapped
:I/O writes made by the user. 

    They converge in the VMIO page cache.

:Maybe we can add some fields in the vm_object to record the real or
:user-specifed area which can be passed to the vnode read and write
:routine. In the vnode I/O routine, we should be able to limit the write to
:only the orginal part of the area specified by the user.  This practice
:should not incur any performance loss.
:
:-Zhihui

    mmap bypasses the vnode.  What you propose will not work because even if
    the VM object is process-specific, the pages underlying the VM object are
    not.  If several processes are mmap()ing overlapping portions of the file,
    they are *sharing* the pages.  So even though they are not sharing the 
    VM object, the VM system will not be able to tell which process modified
    the page, and therefore any byte-ranged limits specified in the VM object
    will be useless.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@backplane.com>


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