[PATCH] x86: add MAP_STACK mmap flag

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Wed Aug 13 2008 - 12:02:18 EST


as per this discussion:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/8/12/423

Pardo reported that 64-bit threaded apps, if their stacks exceed the
combined size of ~4GB, slow down drastically in pthread_create() - because
glibc uses MAP_32BIT to allocate the stacks. The use of MAP_32BIT is
a legacy hack - to speed up context switching on certain early model
64-bit P4 CPUs.

So introduce a new flag to be used by glibc instead, to not constrain
64-bit apps like this.

glibc can switch to this new flag straight away - it will be ignored
by the kernel. If those old CPUs ever matter to anyone, support for
it can be implemented.

Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx>
---
include/asm-x86/mman.h | 1 +
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/include/asm-x86/mman.h b/include/asm-x86/mman.h
index c1682b5..e5852b5 100644
--- a/include/asm-x86/mman.h
+++ b/include/asm-x86/mman.h
@@ -12,6 +12,7 @@
#define MAP_NORESERVE 0x4000 /* don't check for reservations */
#define MAP_POPULATE 0x8000 /* populate (prefault) pagetables */
#define MAP_NONBLOCK 0x10000 /* do not block on IO */
+#define MAP_STACK 0x20000 /* give out 32bit stack addresses on old CPUs */

#define MCL_CURRENT 1 /* lock all current mappings */
#define MCL_FUTURE 2 /* lock all future mappings */
--
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