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Date:      Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:30:42 -0600
From:      Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org>
To:        John-Mark Gurney <gurney_j@resnet.uoregon.edu>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>, Aziz Kezzou <french.linuxian@gmail.com>, freebsd-net <freebsd-net@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD Memory Management questions ?
Message-ID:  <42AF4C82.7070306@samsco.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050614212214.GK742@funkthat.com>
References:  <37273927050614012154fdb80b@mail.gmail.com> <20050614212214.GK742@funkthat.com>

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John-Mark Gurney wrote:

> Aziz Kezzou wrote this message on Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 04:21 -0400:
> 
>>I have two questions concerning FreeBSD Memory management :
>>
>>1 - Right now to access the memory address space of a user process
>>from kernel mode, I only have to set, on x86 systems, the register CR3
>>to the right value.  How can I do that on other architectures ? is
>>there an architecture-independant way of doing that ?
>>
>>2- I have noticed that while in kernel mode the value of CR3 is equal
>>to that of the user process beeing interrupted. Doesn't the kernel
>>supposed to have its "own" page-directory, i.e it's own CR3  value ?
>>or is kernel virtual address resolution does  not go through CR3 at
>>all ?
> 
> 
> You should be using copyin(9)/copyout(9) instead of playing around with
> CR3 directly...  or fuword(9)/suword(9)...  This provides a platform
> independant way of accessing user's memory (for the current running
> process)...
> 

Not to mention that setting CR3, or whatever on other platforms, doesn't
handle accessing pages that have been swapped out.  That's the real
magic that copyin/copyout does.

Scott



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