15.2. The mmap Device OperationMemory mapping is one of the most interesting features of modern Unix systems. As far as drivers are concerned, memory mapping can be implemented to provide user programs with direct access to device memory.A definitive example of mmap usage can be seen by looking at a subset of the virtual memory areas for the X Window System server: cat /proc/731/mapsThe full list of the X server's VMAs is lengthy, but most of the entries are not of interest here. We do see, however, four separate mappings of /dev/mem, which give some insight into how the X server works with the video card. The first mapping is at a0000, which is the standard location for video RAM in the 640-KB ISA hole. Further down, we see a large mapping at e8000000, an address which is above the highest RAM address on the system. This is a direct mapping of the video memory on the adapter.These regions can also be seen in /proc/iomem: 000a0000-000bffff : Video RAM areaMapping a device means associating a range of user-space addresses to device memory. Whenever the program reads or writes in the assigned address range, it is actually accessing the device. In the X server example, using mmap allows quick and easy access to the video card's memory. For a performance-critical application like this, direct access makes a large difference. As you might suspect, not every device lends itself to the mmap abstraction; it makes no sense, for instance, for serial ports and other stream-oriented devices. Another limitation of mmap is that mapping is PAGE_SIZE grained. The kernel can manage virtual addresses only at the level of page tables; therefore, the mapped area must be a multiple of PAGE_SIZE and must live in physical memory starting at an address that is a multiple of PAGE_SIZE. The kernel forces size granularity by making a region slightly bigger if its size isn't a multiple of the page size.These limits are not a big constraint for drivers, because the program accessing the device is device dependent anyway. Since the program must know about how the device works, the programmer is not unduly bothered by the need to see to details like page alignment. A bigger constraint exists when ISA devices are used on some non-x86 platforms, because their hardware view of ISA may not be contiguous. For example, some Alpha computers see ISA memory as a scattered set of 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit items, with no direct mapping. In such cases, you can't use mmap at all. The inability to perform direct mapping of ISA addresses to Alpha addresses is due to the incompatible data transfer specifications of the two systems. Whereas early Alpha processors could issue only 32-bit and 64-bit memory accesses, ISA can do only 8-bit and 16-bit transfers, and there's no way to transparently map one protocol onto the other.There are sound advantages to using mmap when it's feasible to do so. For instance, we have already looked at the X server, which transfers a lot of data to and from video memory; mapping the graphic display to user space dramatically improves the throughput, as opposed to an lseek/write implementation. Another typical example is a program controlling a PCI device. Most PCI peripherals map their control registers to a memory address, and a high-performance application might prefer to have direct access to the registers instead of repeatedly having to call ioctl to get its work done. The mmap method is part of the file_operations structure and is invoked when the mmap system call is issued. With mmap, the kernel performs a good deal of work before the actual method is invoked, and, therefore, the prototype of the method is quite different from that of the system call. This is unlike calls such as ioctl and poll, where the kernel does not do much before calling the method.The system call is declared as follows (as described in the mmap(2) manual page): mmap (caddr_t addr, size_t len, int prot, int flags, int fd, off_t offset)On the other hand, the file operation is declared as: int (*mmap) (struct file *filp, struct vm_area_struct *vma);The filp argument in the method is the same as that introduced in Chapter 3, while vma contains the information about the virtual address range that is used to access the device. Therefore, much of the work has been done by the kernel; to implement mmap, the driver only has to build suitable page tables for the address range and, if necessary, replace vma->vm_ops with a new set of operations.There are two ways of building the page tables: doing it all at once with a function called remap_pfn_range or doing it a page at a time via the nopage VMA method. Each method has its advantages and limitations. We start with the "all at once" approach, which is simpler. From there, we add the complications needed for a real-world implementation. 15.2.1. Using remap_pfn_rangeThe job of building new page tables to map a range of physical addresses is handled by remap_pfn_range and io_remap_page_range, which have the following prototypes: int remap_pfn_range(struct vm_area_struct *vma,The value returned by the function is the usual 0 or a negative error code. Let's look at the exact meaning of the function's arguments:
The arguments to remap_pfn_range are fairly straightforward, and most of them are already provided to you in the VMA when your mmap method is called. You may be wondering why there are two functions, however. The first (remap_pfn_range) is intended for situations where pfn refers to actual system RAM, while io_remap_page_range should be used when phys_addr points to I/O memory. In practice, the two functions are identical on every architecture except the SPARC, and you see remap_pfn_range used in most situations. In the interest of writing portable drivers, however, you should use the variant of remap_pfn_range that is suited to your particular situation.One other complication has to do with caching: usually, references to device memory should not be cached by the processor. Often the system BIOS sets things up properly, but it is also possible to disable caching of specific VMAs via the protection field. Unfortunately, disabling caching at this level is highly processor dependent. The curious reader may wish to look at the pgprot_noncached function from drivers/char/mem.c to see what's involved. We won't discuss the topic further here. 15.2.2. A Simple ImplementationIf your driver needs to do a simple, linear mapping of device memory into a user address space, remap_pfn_range is almost all you really need to do the job. The following code is derived from drivers/char/mem.c and shows how this task is performed in a typical module called simple (Simple Implementation Mapping Pages with Little Enthusiasm): static int simple_remap_mmap(struct file *filp, struct vm_area_struct *vma)As you can see, remapping memory just a matter of calling remap_pfn_range to create the necessary page tables. 15.2.3. Adding VMA OperationsAs we have seen, the vm_area_struct structure contains a set of operations that may be applied to the VMA. Now we look at providing those operations in a simple way. In particular, we provide open and close operations for our VMA. These operations are called whenever a process opens or closes the VMA; in particular, the open method is invoked anytime a process forks and creates a new reference to the VMA. The open and close VMA methods are called in addition to the processing performed by the kernel, so they need not reimplement any of the work done there. They exist as a way for drivers to do any additional processing that they may require.As it turns out, a simple driver such as simple need not do any extra processing in particular. So we have created open and close methods, which print a message to the system log informing the world that they have been called. Not particularly useful, but it does allow us to show how these methods can be provided, and see when they are invoked.To this end, we override the default vma->vm_ops with operations that call printk: void simple_vma_open(struct vm_area_struct *vma)To make these operations active for a specific mapping, it is necessary to store a pointer to simple_remap_vm_ops in the vm_ops field of the relevant VMA. This is usually done in the mmap method. If you turn back to the simple_remap_mmap example, you see these lines of code: vma->vm_ops = &simple_remap_vm_ops;Note the explicit call to simple_vma_open. Since the open method is not invoked on the initial mmap, we must call it explicitly if we want it to run. 15.2.4. Mapping Memory with nopageAlthough remap_pfn_range works well for many, if not most, driver mmap implementations, sometimes it is necessary to be a little more flexible. In such situations, an implementation using the nopage VMA method may be called for.One situation in which the nopage approach is useful can be brought about by the mremap system call, which is used by applications to change the bounding addresses of a mapped region. As it happens, the kernel does not notify drivers directly when a mapped VMA is changed by mremap. If the VMA is reduced in size, the kernel can quietly flush out the unwanted pages without telling the driver. If, instead, the VMA is expanded, the driver eventually finds out by way of calls to nopage when mappings must be set up for the new pages, so there is no need to perform a separate notification. The nopage method, therefore, must be implemented if you want to support the mremap system call. Here, we show a simple implementation of nopage for the simple device.The nopage method, remember, has the following prototype: struct page *(*nopage)(struct vm_area_struct *vma, When a user process attempts to access a page in a VMA that is not present in memory, the associated nopage function is called. The address parameter contains the virtual address that caused the fault, rounded down to the beginning of the page. The nopage function must locate and return the struct page pointer that refers to the page the user wanted. This function must also take care to increment the usage count for the page it returns by calling the get_page macro: get_page(struct page *pageptr);This step is necessary to keep the reference counts correct on the mapped pages. The kernel maintains this count for every page; when the count goes to 0, the kernel knows that the page may be placed on the free list. When a VMA is unmapped, the kernel decrements the usage count for every page in the area. If your driver does not increment the count when adding a page to the area, the usage count becomes 0 prematurely, and the integrity of the system is compromised.The nopage method should also store the type of fault in the location pointed to by the type argumentbut only if that argument is not NULL. In device drivers, the proper value for type will invariably be VM_FAULT_MINOR.If you are using nopage, there is usually very little work to be done when mmap is called; our version looks like this: static int simple_nopage_mmap(struct file *filp, struct vm_area_struct *vma)The main thing mmap has to do is to replace the default (NULL) vm_ops pointer with our own operations. The nopage method then takes care of "remapping" one page at a time and returning the address of its struct page structure. Because we are just implementing a window onto physical memory here, the remapping step is simple: we only need to locate and return a pointer to the struct page for the desired address. Our nopage method looks like the following: struct page *simple_vma_nopage(struct vm_area_struct *vma,Since, once again, we are simply mapping main memory here, the nopage function need only find the correct struct page for the faulting address and increment its reference count. Therefore, the required sequence of events is to calculate the desired physical address, and turn it into a page frame number by right-shifting it PAGE_SHIFT bits. Since user space can give us any address it likes, we must ensure that we have a valid page frame; the pfn_valid function does that for us. If the address is out of range, we return NOPAGE_SIGBUS, which causes a bus signal to be delivered to the calling process. Otherwise, pfn_to_page gets the necessary struct page pointer; we can increment its reference count (with a call to get_page) and return it.The nopage method normally returns a pointer to a struct page. If, for some reason, a normal page cannot be returned (e.g., the requested address is beyond the device's memory region), NOPAGE_SIGBUS can be returned to signal the error; that is what the simple code above does. nopage can also return NOPAGE_OOM to indicate failures caused by resource limitations.Note that this implementation works for ISA memory regions but not for those on the PCI bus. PCI memory is mapped above the highest system memory, and there are no entries in the system memory map for those addresses. Because there is no struct page to return a pointer to, nopage cannot be used in these situations; you must use remap_pfn_range instead.If the nopage method is left NULL, kernel code that handles page faults maps the zero page to the faulting virtual address. The zero page is a copy-on-write page that reads as 0 and that is used, for example, to map the BSS segment. Any process referencing the zero page sees exactly that: a page filled with zeroes. If the process writes to the page, it ends up modifying a private copy. Therefore, if a process extends a mapped region by calling mremap, and the driver hasn't implemented nopage, the process ends up with zero-filled memory instead of a segmentation fault. 15.2.5. Remapping Specific I/O RegionsAll the examples we've seen so far are reimplementations of /dev/mem; they remap physical addresses into user space. The typical driver, however, wants to map only the small address range that applies to its peripheral device, not all memory. In order to map to user space only a subset of the whole memory range, the driver needs only to play with the offsets. The following does the trick for a driver mapping a region of simple_region_size bytes, beginning at physical address simple_region_start (which should be page-aligned): unsigned long off = vma->vm_pgoff << PAGE_SHIFT;In addition to calculating the offsets, this code introduces a check that reports an error when the program tries to map more memory than is available in the I/O region of the target device. In this code, psize is the physical I/O size that is left after the offset has been specified, and vsize is the requested size of virtual memory; the function refuses to map addresses that extend beyond the allowed memory range.Note that the user process can always use mremap to extend its mapping, possibly past the end of the physical device area. If your driver fails to define a nopage method, it is never notified of this extension, and the additional area maps to the zero page. As a driver writer, you may well want to prevent this sort of behavior; mapping the zero page onto the end of your region is not an explicitly bad thing to do, but it is highly unlikely that the programmer wanted that to happen.The simplest way to prevent extension of the mapping is to implement a simple nopage method that always causes a bus signal to be sent to the faulting process. Such a method would look like this: struct page *simple_nopage(struct vm_area_struct *vma,As we have seen, the nopage method is called only when the process dereferences an address that is within a known VMA but for which there is currently no valid page table entry. If we have used remap_pfn_range to map the entire device region, the nopage method shown here is called only for references outside of that region. Thus, it can safely return NOPAGE_SIGBUS to signal an error. Of course, a more thorough implementation of nopage could check to see whether the faulting address is within the device area, and perform the remapping if that is the case. Once again, however, nopage does not work with PCI memory areas, so extension of PCI mappings is not possible. 15.2.6. Remapping RAMAn interesting limitation of remap_pfn_range is that it gives access only to reserved pages and physical addresses above the top of physical memory. In Linux, a page of physical addresses is marked as "reserved" in the memory map to indicate that it is not available for memory management. On the PC, for example, the range between 640 KB and 1 MB is marked as reserved, as are the pages that host the kernel code itself. Reserved pages are locked in memory and are the only ones that can be safely mapped to user space; this limitation is a basic requirement for system stability.Therefore, remap_pfn_range won't allow you to remap conventional addresses, which include the ones you obtain by calling get_free_page. Instead, it maps in the zero page. Everything appears to work, with the exception that the process sees private, zero-filled pages rather than the remapped RAM that it was hoping for. Nonetheless, the function does everything that most hardware drivers need it to do, because it can remap high PCI buffers and ISA memory. The limitations of remap_pfn_range can be seen by running mapper, one of the sample programs in misc-progs in the files provided on O'Reilly's FTP site. mapper is a simple tool that can be used to quickly test the mmap system call; it maps read-only parts of a file specified by command-line options and dumps the mapped region to standard output. The following session, for instance, shows that /dev/mem doesn't map the physical page located at address 64 KBinstead, we see a page full of zeros (the host computer in this example is a PC, but the result would be the same on other platforms): morgana.root# ./mapper /dev/mem 0x10000 0x1000 | od -Ax -t x1The inability of remap_pfn_range to deal with RAM suggests that memory-based devices like scull can't easily implement mmap, because its device memory is conventional RAM, not I/O memory. Fortunately, a relatively easy workaround is available to any driver that needs to map RAM into user space; it uses the nopage method that we have seen earlier. 15.2.6.1 Remapping RAM with the nopage methodThe way to map real RAM to user space is to use vm_ops->nopage to deal with page faults one at a time. A sample implementation is part of the scullp module, introduced in Chapter 8.scullp is a page-oriented char device. Because it is page oriented, it can implement mmap on its memory. The code implementing memory mapping uses some of the concepts introduced in Section 15.1.Before examining the code, let's look at the design choices that affect the mmap implementation in scullp:
The zero-order limitation is mostly intended to keep the code simple. It is possible to correctly implement mmap for multipage allocations by playing with the usage count of the pages, but it would only add to the complexity of the example without introducing any interesting information.Code that is intended to map RAM according to the rules just outlined needs to implement the open, close, and nopage VMA methods; it also needs to access the memory map to adjust the page usage counts.This implementation of scullp_mmap is very short, because it relies on the nopage function to do all the interesting work: int scullp_mmap(struct file *filp, struct vm_area_struct *vma)The purpose of the if statement is to avoid mapping devices whose allocation order is not 0. scullp's operations are stored in the vm_ops field, and a pointer to the device structure is stashed in the vm_private_data field. At the end, vm_ops->open is called to update the count of active mappings for the device.open and close simply keep track of the mapping count and are defined as follows: void scullp_vma_open(struct vm_area_struct *vma)Most of the work is then performed by nopage. In the scullp implementation, the address parameter to nopage is used to calculate an offset into the device; the offset is then used to look up the correct page in the scullp memory tree: struct page *scullp_vma_nopage(struct vm_area_struct *vma,scullp uses memory obtained with get_free_pages. That memory is addressed using logical addresses, so all scullp_nopage has to do to get a struct page pointer is to call virt_to_page.The scullp device now works as expected, as you can see in this sample output from the mapper utility. Here, we send a directory listing of /dev (which is long) to the scullp device and then use the mapper utility to look at pieces of that listing with mmap: morgana% ls -l /dev > /dev/scullp 15.2.7. Remapping Kernel Virtual AddressesAlthough it's rarely necessary, it's interesting to see how a driver can map a kernel virtual address to user space using mmap. A true kernel virtual address, remember, is an address returned by a function such as vmallocthat is, a virtual address mapped in the kernel page tables. The code in this section is taken from scullv, which is the module that works like scullp but allocates its storage through vmalloc.Most of the scullv implementation is like the one we've just seen for scullp, except that there is no need to check the order parameter that controls memory allocation. The reason for this is that vmalloc allocates its pages one at a time, because single-page allocations are far more likely to succeed than multipage allocations. Therefore, the allocation order problem doesn't apply to vmalloced space.Beyond that, there is only one difference between the nopage implementations used by scullp and scullv. Remember that scullp, once it found the page of interest, would obtain the corresponding struct page pointer with virt_to_page. That function does not work with kernel virtual addresses, however. Instead, you must use vmalloc_to_page. So the final part of the scullv version of nopage looks like: /*Based on this discussion, you might also want to map addresses returned by ioremap to user space. That would be a mistake, however; addresses from ioremap are special and cannot be treated like normal kernel virtual addresses. Instead, you should use remap_pfn_range to remap I/O memory areas into user space. |
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