aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/Documentation
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorAndi Kleen <ak@suse.de>2007-07-21 17:10:01 +0200
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>2007-07-21 18:37:08 -0700
commit2aae950b21e4bc789d1fc6668faf67e8748300b7 (patch)
tree5777768cc2493695ec9f4000c14f3584b3db28fd /Documentation
parenta586df067afe0580bb02b7a6312ca2afe49bba03 (diff)
x86_64: Add vDSO for x86-64 with gettimeofday/clock_gettime/getcpu
This implements new vDSO for x86-64. The concept is similar to the existing vDSOs on i386 and PPC. x86-64 has had static vsyscalls before, but these are not flexible enough anymore. A vDSO is a ELF shared library supplied by the kernel that is mapped into user address space. The vDSO mapping is randomized for each process for security reasons. Doing this was needed for clock_gettime, because clock_gettime always needs a syscall fallback and having one at a fixed address would have made buffer overflow exploits too easy to write. The vdso can be disabled with vdso=0 It currently includes a new gettimeofday implemention and optimized clock_gettime(). The gettimeofday implementation is slightly faster than the one in the old vsyscall. clock_gettime is significantly faster than the syscall for CLOCK_MONOTONIC and CLOCK_REALTIME. The new calls are generally faster than the old vsyscall. Advantages over the old x86-64 vsyscalls: - Extensible - Randomized - Cleaner - Easier to virtualize (the old static address range previously causes overhead e.g. for Xen because it has to create special page tables for it) Weak points: - glibc support still to be written The VM interface is partly based on Ingo Molnar's i386 version. Includes compile fix from Joachim Deguara Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt2
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
index 5fbe07706ae..fb80e9ffea6 100644
--- a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -1882,7 +1882,7 @@ and is between 256 and 4096 characters. It is defined in the file
usbhid.mousepoll=
[USBHID] The interval which mice are to be polled at.
- vdso= [IA-32,SH]
+ vdso= [IA-32,SH,x86-64]
vdso=2: enable compat VDSO (default with COMPAT_VDSO)
vdso=1: enable VDSO (default)
vdso=0: disable VDSO mapping