1) A new mechanism has been added to prevent pages from being paged
out called "vm_page_hold". Similar to vm_page_wire, but
much lower overhead.
2) Scheduling algorithm has been changed to improve interactive
performance.
3) Paging algorithm improved.
4) Some vnode and swap pager bugs fixed.
Eliminates vm_fault overhead on process startup and
mmap referenced data for in-memory pages.
(process startup time using in-memory segments *much* faster)
2) Even more efficient pmap code. Code partially cleaned up.
More comments yet to follow.
(generally more efficient pte management)
3) Pageout clustering ( in addition to the FreeBSD V1.1 pagein
clustering.)
(much faster paging performance on non-write behind disk
subsystems, slightly faster performance on other systems.)
4) Slightly changed vm_pageout code for more efficiency and
better statistics. Also, resist swapout a little more.
(less likely to pageout a recently used page)
5) Slight improvement to the page table page trap efficiency.
(generally faster system VM fault performance)
6) Defer creation of unnamed anonymous regions pager until needed.
(speeds up shared memory bss creation)
7) Remove possible deadlock from swap_pager initialization.
8) Enhanced procfs to provide "vminfo" about vm objects and user
pmaps.
9) Increased MCLSHIFT/MCLBYTES from 2K to 4K to improve net &
socket performance and to prepare for things to come.
John Dyson
dyson@implode.root.com
David Greenman
davidg@root.com
a pv chain was being traversed while interrupts were
fully enabled in pmap_remove_all ... this is bogus, and
has been fixed in pmap.c. (sorry for adding the splimp)
Description:
The integer overflow instruction (into) and the interrupt instruction with
value 4 (int #4) both give rise to SIGBUS signals rather than SIGFPE. The
problem is that overflow is a trap not a fault (unlike the BOUND instruction).
following is a summary:
1) increased object cache back up to a more reasonable value.
2) removed old & bogus cruft from machdep.c (clearseg, copyseg,
physcopyseg, etc).
3) inlined many functions in pmap.c
4) changed "load_cr3(rcr3())" into tlbflush() and made tlbflush inline
assembly.
5) changed the way that modified pages are tracked - now vm_page struct
is kept updated directly - no more scanning page tables.
6) removed lots of unnecessary spl's
7) removed old unused functions from pmap.c
8) removed all use of page_size, page_shift, page_mask variables - replaced
with PAGE_ constants.
9) moved trunc/round_page, atop, ptoa, out of vm_param.h and into i386/
include/param.h, and optimized them.
10) numerous changes to sys/vm/ swap_pager, vnode_pager, pageout, fault
code to improve performance. LRU algorithm modified to be more
effective, read ahead/behind values tuned for better performance,
etc, etc...
problem with some chipsets (UMC) remapping the 'hole' memory even when
you've got 16MB. People were led to believe that since there was only
16MB of memory in the machine, that they were okay wrt the ISA DMA
limit. This hack simply causes the extra memory to be ignored if it
appears around the 16MB limit.
* Removed pmap_is_wired
* added extra cli/sti protection in idle (swtch.s)
* slight code improvement in trap.c
* added lots of comments
* improved paging and other algorithms in VM system
Changed the output of the isa probe routine, that only devices, that
have an IO address and are smaller than 0x100 to be on the motherboard.
The seagate SCSI adapter is an example of a card, that doesn't have
an IO address and works only memory mapped.
a binary link-kit. Make all non-optional options (pagers, procfs) standard,
and update LINT to reflect new symtab requirements.
NB: -Wtraditional will henceforth be forgotten. This editing pass was
primarily intended to detect any constructions where the old code might
have been relying on traditional C semantics or syntax. These were all
fixed, and the result of fixing some of them means that -Wall is now a
realistic possibility within a few weeks.
John Dyson to make it reliably work under FreeBSD.
2) Added and enabled PROCFS in the GENERICxx and LINT kernels.
3) New execve() from me. Still work to be done here, but this version
works well and is needed before other changes can be made. For
a description of the design behind this, see freebsd-arch or
ask me.
4) Rewrote stack fault code; made user stack VM grow as needed rather
than all up front; improves performance a little and reduces
process memory requirements.
5) Incorporated fix from Gene Stark to fault/wire a user page table
page to fix a problem in copyout. This is a temporary fix and
is not appropriate for pageable page tables. For a description
of the problem, see Gene's post to the freebsd-hackers mailing
list.
6) Tighten up vm_page struct to reduce memory requirements for it. ifdef
pager page lock code as it's not being used currently.
7) Introduced new element to vmspace struct - vm_minsaddr; initial
(minimum) stack address. Compliment to vm_maxsaddr.
8) Added a panic if the allocation for process u-pages fails.
9) Improve performance and accuracy of kernel profiling by putting in
a little inline assembly instead of spl().
10) Made serial console with sio driver work. Still has problems with
serial input, but is almost useable.
11) Added -Bstatic to SYSTEM_LD in Makefile.i386 so that kernels will
build properly with the new ld.
The following patch adds the addr argument to signal handlers.
The kernel with the patch is no more and no less in compliance or in
violation of POSIX and ANSI C than the kernel before the patch.
The added functionality this addr argument provides is quite useful. It
enables an entire class of algorithms which use mprotect to trace memory
references. Beside garbage collectors, I have heard of this technique being
applied to debuggers and profilers. The only benchmarking I've performed is
using akcl to compile maxima: without the kernel patch, it takes 7 hours to
compile maxima, while with stratified garbage collection, it only takes 50
minutes.
Basically, I can't think of a reason not to add the addr argument and there
is a compelling need for it.
If you find the patch acceptable, please let me know so I can send my
FreeBSD akcl config files to wfs for inclusion in the core akcl release.
The old 386BSD config files there won't work on either NetBSD or FreeBSD.
Subject: Page fault in PTE area fails in copyout
Index: sys/i386/i386/trap.c FreeBSD-1.0.2
Description:
Reading files of several megabytes into Emacs, or many small
files all at once, would fail with "IO error - bad address".
Repeat-By:
The bug can be exercised by a test program that malloc()'s
a 5MB chunk of memory, and then, without accessing the memory
first, filling it with data from a file using read().
(I read 64k chunks from /dev/wd0d into successive 64k regions
of the 5MB chunk.) The read() will fail with EFAULT at the first
virtual address boundary that is a multiple of 0x400000.
Fix:
The problem was code in sys/i386/i386/trap.c that tries to
figure out what kind of trap occurred and to handle it appropriately.
It was interpreting any page fault with virtual address
>= vm->vm_maxsaddr as being a user stack segment fault.
In fact, addresses >= USRSTACK are in the user structure/PTE area,
and if they are handled as stack faults, the proper PTE will
not be paged in when it is supposed to be. This situation comes
up in copyout() and copyoutstr(), if PTE's are accessed for the
first time ever. The page fault on accessing the nonexistent PTE
is mishandled as a stack fault, and then the fault that occurs on
the subsequent access to the page itself causes copyout to fail
with EFAULT.
