ARM: 8331/1: VDSO initialization, mapping, and synchronization
Initialize the VDSO page list at boot, install the VDSO mapping at exec time, and update the data page during timer ticks. This code is not built if CONFIG_VDSO is not enabled. Account for the VDSO length when randomizing the offset from the stack. The [vdso] and [vvar] pages are placed immediately following the sigpage with separate _install_special_mapping calls. We want to "penalize" systems lacking the arch timer as little as possible. Previous versions of this code installed the VDSO unconditionally and unmodified, making it a measurably slower way for glibc to invoke the real syscalls on such systems. E.g. calling gettimeofday via glibc goes from ~560ns to ~630ns on i.MX6Q. If we can indicate to glibc that the time-related APIs in the VDSO are not accelerated, glibc can continue to invoke the syscalls directly instead of dispatching through the VDSO only to fall back to the slow path. Thus, if the architected timer is unusable for whatever reason, patch the VDSO at boot time so that symbol lookups for gettimeofday and clock_gettime return NULL. (This is similar to what powerpc does and borrows code from there.) This allows glibc to perform the syscall directly instead of passing control to the VDSO, which minimizes the penalty. In my measurements the time taken for a gettimeofday call via glibc goes from ~560ns to ~580ns (again on i.MX6Q), and this is solely due to adding a test and branch to glibc's gettimeofday syscall wrapper. An alternative to patching the VDSO at boot would be to not install the VDSO at all when the arch timer isn't usable. Another alternative is to include a separate "dummy" vdso.so without gettimeofday and clock_gettime, which would be selected at boot time. Either of these would get cumbersome if the VDSO were to gain support for an API such as getcpu which is unrelated to arch timer support. Signed-off-by: Nathan Lynch <nathan_lynch@mentor.com> Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk>
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