Re: Atomic mmap replacement

[Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>]

On 2/19/2018 12:19 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Feb 19 08:22, Ken Brown wrote:
>> On 2/19/2018 4:00 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>> On Feb 17 22:37, Ken Brown wrote:
>>>> Some code in emacs wants to reserve a chunk of address space with a big
>>>> PROT_NONE anonymous mapping, and then carve it up into separate mappings
>>>> associated to segments of a file.  This fails on Cygwin.  Here's a test case
>>>> that illustrates the problem:
>>>> [...]
>>> Several limitations in the Windows kernel disallow this:
>>>
>>> - It doesn't allow to unmap parts of a map, only the entire map as a
>>>     whole.
>>>     Cygwin has a workaround: If you unmap parts of a map it just keeps
>>>     track of this and sets the protection of the affected pages to
>>>     PAGE_NOACCESS.  In case of anonymous mappings, it even recycles them
>>>     potentially for other mappings.
>>>
>>> - It also disallows to re-map any allocated or mapped mamory for another
>>>     purpose.
>>>
>>> So this part of the POSIX specs for mmap:
>>>
>>>     "The mapping established by mmap() shall replace any previous mappings
>>>      for those whole pages containing any part of the address space of the
>>>      process starting at pa and continuing for len bytes"
>>>
>>> can't be implemented with Windows means.
>>>
>>> The only workaround possible would be to handle this *exact* scenario as
>>> a special case in Cygwin's mmap:  If the new mapping falls in the middle
>>> of an existing mapping and if the original mapping was an anonymous
>>> mapping with PROT_NONE page protection, then
> 
> On second thought, we *could* do this, if the pages have been mmapped
> before(*).  Unfortunately this would require a *major* revamp of the
> page handling in mmap.  We would have to keep the mapping of every
> single 64K page separate.
> 
> I.e., requesting a file mapping of 256K at offset 0 on the POSIX level
> would have to be handled as four Windows file mappings under the hood:
> 
> 1. a 64K file mapping at offset 0
> 2. a 64K file mapping at offset 65536
> 3. a 64K file mapping at offset 131072
> 4. a 64K file mapping at offset 196608
> 
> A request to mmap another 64K page to the third mapping in this example
> could then be done by unmapping the third mapping and replace it with
> the requested mapping.
> 
> I'm not sure this is feasible.  It would complicate and slow down the
> code especially for big mappings; one call to NtCreateSection and one to
> NtMapViewOfSection per 64K page, plus the overhead of making sure that
> all mappings are in the right, sequential order in memory.  Plus the
> overhead of having to remap a lot more mappings in forked children.  The
> "Cygwin is slow" meme would get another interesting facet :}

That doesn't sound great.

In the meantime, the problem was solved on the emacs side by doing what 
you suggested in your previous email:

 > - unmap the old mapping
 > - remap the unaffected parts as separate anonymous mapping
 > - map the affected parts for the requested file mapping

But in the emacs application it's simpler, because there are no 
unaffected parts, so step 2 can be skipped.

Thanks.

Ken

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