L4 fpages

[Björn Döbel]

On 15.01.2011 19:15, Björn Döbel wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> OK, but what if I want extend address space of a task
>> how I can do this? And also, what is the default size
>> for a address space for a task?
>
> you need to distinguish two things here. Part one are the concepts 
> behind memory management, part two are the concrete implementations in 
> Fiasco.OC and the L4 runtime environment.
>
> Let's start with the concepts.
>
> When an application runs (e.g., because you just started it and it is 
> now trying to access its first instruction), it accesses memory. If 
> there is now mapping in the hardware page table, a page fault 
> exception is raised by the CPU. This ends up being handled by the kernel.
>
> We do user-level memory management, which means that everything from 
> page fault handling to higher level concepts is done by applications 
> themselves instead of the kernel. Therefore, the kernel redirects the 
> page fault to a user-level page fault handler. The handler is just 
> another user-level thread, which then performs the real work of 
> handling a page fault, e.g., by mapping an already available range of 
> memory (e.g., a part of a file) to the faulting thread.
>
> To do so, the handler needs to keep knowledge about how a client's  
> address space.
>
>
> Now to the implementation:
>
> * The Fiasco.OC kernel knows a page fault handler thread for each 
> thread in the system.
> * The kernel uses IPC for sending the page fault message to the handler.
> * The handler can map an arbitrary part from his own address space to 
> the client. We call such a part a "region".
> * Mapping regions is done through IPC. To do so, the sender attaches a 
> special data type describing a memory region to the
>    IPC message. The kernel detects this and establishes a memory 
> mapping accordingly. This data type is called a "flexpage".
> * In order to maintain a task's address space layout, every task has a 
> dedicated "region manager" thread. This thread acts as
>    the PF handler for all other threads in a task and maintains a 
> consistent view of the address space.
> * In order to be able to construct the address space from regions of 
> different sources (e.g., the application binary coming from
>    a file system and anonymous memory coming from a memory manager), 
> we introduce another abstraction for describing
>    memory regions, called "data spaces".
>
>
> This is the very short overview of memory management. More details can 
> for instance be found in our lecture on microkernel-based operating 
> systems, which's slides are available from 
> http://www.inf.tu-dresden.de/index.php?node_id=1314

The L4Re docs at http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4Re/doc/ might also be a 
good starting point.

Bjoern