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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+==============
+5-level paging
+==============
+
+Overview
+========
+Original x86-64 was limited by 4-level paging to 256 TiB of virtual address
+space and 64 TiB of physical address space. We are already bumping into
+this limit: some vendors offer servers with 64 TiB of memory today.
+
+To overcome the limitation upcoming hardware will introduce support for
+5-level paging. It is a straight-forward extension of the current page
+table structure adding one more layer of translation.
+
+It bumps the limits to 128 PiB of virtual address space and 4 PiB of
+physical address space. This "ought to be enough for anybody" ©.
+
+QEMU 2.9 and later support 5-level paging.
+
+Virtual memory layout for 5-level paging is described in
+Documentation/x86/x86_64/mm.rst
+
+
+Enabling 5-level paging
+=======================
+CONFIG_X86_5LEVEL=y enables the feature.
+
+Kernel with CONFIG_X86_5LEVEL=y still able to boot on 4-level hardware.
+In this case additional page table level -- p4d -- will be folded at
+runtime.
+
+User-space and large virtual address space
+==========================================
+On x86, 5-level paging enables 56-bit userspace virtual address space.
+Not all user space is ready to handle wide addresses. It's known that
+at least some JIT compilers use higher bits in pointers to encode their
+information. It collides with valid pointers with 5-level paging and
+leads to crashes.
+
+To mitigate this, we are not going to allocate virtual address space
+above 47-bit by default.
+
+But userspace can ask for allocation from full address space by
+specifying hint address (with or without MAP_FIXED) above 47-bits.
+
+If hint address set above 47-bit, but MAP_FIXED is not specified, we try
+to look for unmapped area by specified address. If it's already
+occupied, we look for unmapped area in *full* address space, rather than
+from 47-bit window.
+
+A high hint address would only affect the allocation in question, but not
+any future mmap()s.
+
+Specifying high hint address on older kernel or on machine without 5-level
+paging support is safe. The hint will be ignored and kernel will fall back
+to allocation from 47-bit address space.
+
+This approach helps to easily make application's memory allocator aware
+about large address space without manually tracking allocated virtual
+address space.
+
+One important case we need to handle here is interaction with MPX.
+MPX (without MAWA extension) cannot handle addresses above 47-bit, so we
+need to make sure that MPX cannot be enabled we already have VMA above
+the boundary and forbid creating such VMAs once MPX is enabled.