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Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) provides a barrier to
exploitation of user-space processes in the presence of security
vulnerabilities by making it more difficult to find desired code/data
which could help an attack.  This is done by adding a random offset to
the location of regions in the process address space, with a greater
range of potential offset values corresponding to better protection/a
larger search-space for brute force, but also to greater potential for
fragmentation.

The offset added to the mmap_base address, which provides the basis for
the majority of the mappings for a process, is set once on process exec
in arch_pick_mmap_layout() and is done via hard-coded per-arch values,
which reflect, hopefully, the best compromise for all systems.  The
trade-off between increased entropy in the offset value generation and
the corresponding increased variability in address space fragmentation
is not absolute, however, and some platforms may...