On Thu, May 08, 2014 at 03:29:32PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:

quoted

quoted

I think the whole man page for remap_file_pages is a litt confusing I
have to say, the concept of a VMA is purely kernel internal and doesn't
really have a meaning for applications and thus shouldn't appear in a
man page.

I agree it could be better. Do you have a suggested text?

Does the patch below look good?  I tries to explain it in user visible
behavior:

diff --git a/man2/remap_file_pages.2 b/man2/remap_file_pages.2
index 67251e3..716b911 100644
--- a/man2/remap_file_pages.2
+++ b/man2/remap_file_pages.2

@@ -46,8 +46,7 @@ The advantage of using
 .BR remap_file_pages ()
 over using repeated calls to
 .BR mmap (2)
-is that the former approach does not require the kernel to create
-additional VMA (Virtual Memory Area) data structures.
+is that the kernel can implement it more efficiently.

 To create a nonlinear mapping we perform the following steps:
 .TP 3

@@ -160,11 +159,18 @@ Since Linux 2.6.23,
 .BR remap_file_pages ()
 creates non-linear mappings only
 on in-memory file systems such as tmpfs, hugetlbfs or ramfs.
+
 On filesystems with a backing store,
 .BR remap_file_pages ()
 is not much more efficient than using
 .BR mmap (2)
 to adjust which parts of the file are mapped to which addresses.
+
+Non-linear mappings created by
+.BR remap_file_pages ()
+do not count against the limit of memory mappings set in
+.I /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count
+unless the above mentioned emulation is used.
 .SH SEE ALSO
 .BR getpagesize (2),
 .BR mmap (2),