[ARM] Add detailed documentation concerning ARM page tables

This adds detailed documentation concerning how we map the Linux
page table structure onto the hardware tables on ARM.  In addition,
it also adds documentation describing how we emulate the "dirty"
and "young" or "accessed" page table bits.

This should be of interest to Linux MM developers.

diff --git a/include/asm-arm/pgtable.h b/include/asm-arm/pgtable.h
index 94522584d6f6f182ee92cb113684e293c9ee4ed9..a0d71213c8dc41551cbc266fca01e0ff0a1d3ce7 100644 (file)
--- a/include/asm-arm/pgtable.h
+++ b/include/asm-arm/pgtable.h
@@ -15,13 +15,62 @@
 #include <asm/arch/vmalloc.h>
 
 /*
- * We pull a couple of tricks here:
- *  1. We wrap the PMD into the PGD.
- *  2. We lie about the size of the PTE and PGD.
- * Even though we have 256 PTE entries and 4096 PGD entries, we tell
- * Linux that we actually have 512 PTE entries and 2048 PGD entries.
- * Each "Linux" PGD entry is made up of two hardware PGD entries, and
- * each PTE table is actually two hardware PTE tables.
+ * Hardware-wise, we have a two level page table structure, where the first
+ * level has 4096 entries, and the second level has 256 entries.  Each entry
+ * is one 32-bit word.  Most of the bits in the second level entry are used
+ * by hardware, and there aren't any "accessed" and "dirty" bits.
+ *
+ * Linux on the other hand has a three level page table structure, which can
+ * be wrapped to fit a two level page table structure easily - using the PGD
+ * and PTE only.  However, Linux also expects one "PTE" table per page, and
+ * at least a "dirty" bit.
+ *
+ * Therefore, we tweak the implementation slightly - we tell Linux that we
+ * have 2048 entries in the first level, each of which is 8 bytes (iow, two
+ * hardware pointers to the second level.)  The second level contains two
+ * hardware PTE tables arranged contiguously, followed by Linux versions
+ * which contain the state information Linux needs.  We, therefore, end up
+ * with 512 entries in the "PTE" level.
+ *
+ * This leads to the page tables having the following layout:
+ *
+ *    pgd             pte
+ * |        |
+ * +--------+ +0
+ * |        |-----> +------------+ +0
+ * +- - - - + +4    |  h/w pt 0  |
+ * |        |-----> +------------+ +1024
+ * +--------+ +8    |  h/w pt 1  |
+ * |        |       +------------+ +2048
+ * +- - - - +       | Linux pt 0 |
+ * |        |       +------------+ +3072
+ * +--------+       | Linux pt 1 |
+ * |        |       +------------+ +4096
+ *
+ * See L_PTE_xxx below for definitions of bits in the "Linux pt", and
+ * PTE_xxx for definitions of bits appearing in the "h/w pt".
+ *
+ * PMD_xxx definitions refer to bits in the first level page table.
+ *
+ * The "dirty" bit is emulated by only granting hardware write permission
+ * iff the page is marked "writable" and "dirty" in the Linux PTE.  This
+ * means that a write to a clean page will cause a permission fault, and
+ * the Linux MM layer will mark the page dirty via handle_pte_fault().
+ * For the hardware to notice the permission change, the TLB entry must
+ * be flushed, and ptep_establish() does that for us.
+ *
+ * The "accessed" or "young" bit is emulated by a similar method; we only
+ * allow accesses to the page if the "young" bit is set.  Accesses to the
+ * page will cause a fault, and handle_pte_fault() will set the young bit
+ * for us as long as the page is marked present in the corresponding Linux
+ * PTE entry.  Again, ptep_establish() will ensure that the TLB is up to
+ * date.
+ *
+ * However, when the "young" bit is cleared, we deny access to the page
+ * by clearing the hardware PTE.  Currently Linux does not flush the TLB
+ * for us in this case, which means the TLB will retain the transation
+ * until either the TLB entry is evicted under pressure, or a context
+ * switch which changes the user space mapping occurs.
  */
 #define PTRS_PER_PTE           512
 #define PTRS_PER_PMD           1