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Paul Mackerras authored
Using 64k pages on 64-bit PowerPC systems makes life difficult for emulators that are trying to emulate an ISA, such as x86, which use a smaller page size, since the emulator can no longer use the MMU and the normal system calls for controlling page protections. Of course, the emulator can emulate the MMU by checking and possibly remapping the address for each memory access in software, but that is pretty slow. This provides a facility for such programs to control the access permissions on individual 4k sub-pages of 64k pages. The idea is that the emulator supplies an array of protection masks to apply to a specified range of virtual addresses. These masks are applied at the level where hardware PTEs are inserted into the hardware page table based on the Linux PTEs, so the Linux PTEs are not affected. Note that this new mechanism does not allow any access that would otherwise be prohibited; it can only prohibit accesses that would ot...
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