On 2017-11-29 15:42, Michal Hocko wrote:

The first patch introduced MAP_FIXED_SAFE which enforces the given
address but unlike MAP_FIXED it fails with ENOMEM if the given range
conflicts with an existing one.

[s/ENOMEM/EEXIST/, as it seems you also did in the actual patch and
changelog]

The flag is introduced as a completely
new one rather than a MAP_FIXED extension because of the backward
compatibility. We really want a never-clobber semantic even on older
kernels which do not recognize the flag. Unfortunately mmap sucks wrt.
flags evaluation because we do not EINVAL on unknown flags. On those
kernels we would simply use the traditional hint based semantic so the
caller can still get a different address (which sucks) but at least not
silently corrupt an existing mapping. I do not see a good way around
that.

I think it would be nice if this rationale was in the 1/2 changelog,
along with the hint about what userspace that wants to be compatible
with old kernels will have to do (namely, check that it got what it
requested) - which I see you did put in the man page.

-- 
Rasmus Villemoes
Software Developer
Prevas A/S
Hedeager 3
DK-8200 Aarhus N
+45 51210274
rasmus.villemoes@prevas.dk
www.prevas.dk

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