docs: rename Documentation/vm to Documentation/mm

so it will be consistent with code mm directory and with
Documentation/admin-guide/mm and won't be confused with virtual machines.

Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>
Suggested-by: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Tested-by: Ira Weiny <ira.weiny@intel.com>
Acked-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Acked-by: Wu XiangCheng <bobwxc@email.cn>

1 files changed, 167 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/mm/highmem.rst b/Documentation/mm/highmem.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..c9887f241c6c
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+.. _highmem:
+
+====================
+High Memory Handling
+====================
+
+By: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
+
+.. contents:: :local:
+
+What Is High Memory?
+====================
+
+High memory (highmem) is used when the size of physical memory approaches or
+exceeds the maximum size of virtual memory.  At that point it becomes
+impossible for the kernel to keep all of the available physical memory mapped
+at all times.  This means the kernel needs to start using temporary mappings of
+the pieces of physical memory that it wants to access.
+
+The part of (physical) memory not covered by a permanent mapping is what we
+refer to as 'highmem'.  There are various architecture dependent constraints on
+where exactly that border lies.
+
+In the i386 arch, for example, we choose to map the kernel into every process's
+VM space so that we don't have to pay the full TLB invalidation costs for
+kernel entry/exit.  This means the available virtual memory space (4GiB on
+i386) has to be divided between user and kernel space.
+
+The traditional split for architectures using this approach is 3:1, 3GiB for
+userspace and the top 1GiB for kernel space::
+
+		+--------+ 0xffffffff
+		| Kernel |
+		+--------+ 0xc0000000
+		|        |
+		| User   |
+		|        |
+		+--------+ 0x00000000
+
+This means that the kernel can at most map 1GiB of physical memory at any one
+time, but because we need virtual address space for other things - including
+temporary maps to access the rest of the physical memory - the actual direct
+map will typically be less (usually around ~896MiB).
+
+Other architectures that have mm context tagged TLBs can have separate kernel
+and user maps.  Some hardware (like some ARMs), however, have limited virtual
+space when they use mm context tags.
+
+
+Temporary Virtual Mappings
+==========================
+
+The kernel contains several ways of creating temporary mappings. The following
+list shows them in order of preference of use.
+
+* kmap_local_page().  This function is used to require short term mappings.
+  It can be invoked from any context (including interrupts) but the mappings
+  can only be used in the context which acquired them.
+
+  This function should be preferred, where feasible, over all the others.
+
+  These mappings are thread-local and CPU-local, meaning that the mapping
+  can only be accessed from within this thread and the thread is bound the
+  CPU while the mapping is active. Even if the thread is preempted (since
+  preemption is never disabled by the function) the CPU can not be
+  unplugged from the system via CPU-hotplug until the mapping is disposed.
+
+  It's valid to take pagefaults in a local kmap region, unless the context
+  in which the local mapping is acquired does not allow it for other reasons.
+
+  kmap_local_page() always returns a valid virtual address and it is assumed
+  that kunmap_local() will never fail.
+
+  Nesting kmap_local_page() and kmap_atomic() mappings is allowed to a certain
+  extent (up to KMAP_TYPE_NR) but their invocations have to be strictly ordered
+  because the map implementation is stack based. See kmap_local_page() kdocs
+  (included in the "Functions" section) for details on how to manage nested
+  mappings.
+
+* kmap_atomic().  This permits a very short duration mapping of a single
+  page.  Since the mapping is restricted to the CPU that issued it, it
+  performs well, but the issuing task is therefore required to stay on that
+  CPU until it has finished, lest some other task displace its mappings.
+
+  kmap_atomic() may also be used by interrupt contexts, since it does not
+  sleep and the callers too may not sleep until after kunmap_atomic() is
+  called.
+
+  Each call of kmap_atomic() in the kernel creates a non-preemptible section
+  and disable pagefaults. This could be a source of unwanted latency. Therefore
+  users should prefer kmap_local_page() instead of kmap_atomic().
+
+  It is assumed that k[un]map_atomic() won't fail.
+
+* kmap().  This should be used to make short duration mapping of a single
+  page with no restrictions on preemption or migration. It comes with an
+  overhead as mapping space is restricted and protected by a global lock
+  for synchronization. When mapping is no longer needed, the address that
+  the page was mapped to must be released with kunmap().
+
+  Mapping changes must be propagated across all the CPUs. kmap() also
+  requires global TLB invalidation when the kmap's pool wraps and it might
+  block when the mapping space is fully utilized until a slot becomes
+  available. Therefore, kmap() is only callable from preemptible context.
+
+  All the above work is necessary if a mapping must last for a relatively
+  long time but the bulk of high-memory mappings in the kernel are
+  short-lived and only used in one place. This means that the cost of
+  kmap() is mostly wasted in such cases. kmap() was not intended for long
+  term mappings but it has morphed in that direction and its use is
+  strongly discouraged in newer code and the set of the preceding functions
+  should be preferred.
+
+  On 64-bit systems, calls to kmap_local_page(), kmap_atomic() and kmap() have
+  no real work to do because a 64-bit address space is more than sufficient to
+  address all the physical memory whose pages are permanently mapped.
+
+* vmap().  This can be used to make a long duration mapping of multiple
+  physical pages into a contiguous virtual space.  It needs global
+  synchronization to unmap.
+
+
+Cost of Temporary Mappings
+==========================
+
+The cost of creating temporary mappings can be quite high.  The arch has to
+manipulate the kernel's page tables, the data TLB and/or the MMU's registers.
+
+If CONFIG_HIGHMEM is not set, then the kernel will try and create a mapping
+simply with a bit of arithmetic that will convert the page struct address into
+a pointer to the page contents rather than juggling mappings about.  In such a
+case, the unmap operation may be a null operation.
+
+If CONFIG_MMU is not set, then there can be no temporary mappings and no
+highmem.  In such a case, the arithmetic approach will also be used.
+
+
+i386 PAE
+========
+
+The i386 arch, under some circumstances, will permit you to stick up to 64GiB
+of RAM into your 32-bit machine.  This has a number of consequences:
+
+* Linux needs a page-frame structure for each page in the system and the
+  pageframes need to live in the permanent mapping, which means:
+
+* you can have 896M/sizeof(struct page) page-frames at most; with struct
+  page being 32-bytes that would end up being something in the order of 112G
+  worth of pages; the kernel, however, needs to store more than just
+  page-frames in that memory...
+
+* PAE makes your page tables larger - which slows the system down as more
+  data has to be accessed to traverse in TLB fills and the like.  One
+  advantage is that PAE has more PTE bits and can provide advanced features
+  like NX and PAT.
+
+The general recommendation is that you don't use more than 8GiB on a 32-bit
+machine - although more might work for you and your workload, you're pretty
+much on your own - don't expect kernel developers to really care much if things
+come apart.
+
+
+Functions
+=========
+
+.. kernel-doc:: include/linux/highmem.h
+.. kernel-doc:: include/linux/highmem-internal.h