Messages in this thread |  | | | Subject | Re: [RFC] VM: I have a dream... | | From | Bryan Henderson <> | | Date | Thu, 26 Jan 2006 11:48:14 -0800 |
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>Are there any Linux file systems that work by mmapping the entire >drive and using the paging system to do the read/writes? With 64 bits >there's enough address space to do that now. How does this perform >compared to a traditional block based scheme?
They pretty much all do that. A filesystem driver doesn't actually map the whole drive into memory addresses all at once and generate page faults by referencing memory -- instead, it generates the page faults explicitly, which it can do more efficiently, and sets up the mappings in smaller pieces as needed (also more efficient). But the code that reads the pages into the file cache and cleans dirty file cache pages out to the disk is the same paging code that responds to page faults on malloc'ed pages and writes such pages out to swap space when their page frames are needed for other things.
>With the IBM 128b address space aren't the devices vulnerable to an >errant program spraying garbage into the address space? Is it better >to map each device into it's own address space?
Partitioning your storage space along device lines and making someone who wants to store something identify a device for it is a pretty primitive way of limiting errant programs. Something like Linux disk quota and rlimit (ulimit) is more appropriate to the task, and systems that gather all their disk storage (even if separate from main memory) into a single automated pool do have such quota systems.
-- Bryan Henderson IBM Almaden Research Center San Jose CA Filesystems
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