
# Copyright (C) 2005-2011 Junjiro R. Okajima
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mmap(2) -- File Memory Mapping
----------------------------------------------------------------------
In aufs, the file-mapped pages are handled by a branch fs directly, no
interaction with aufs. It means aufs_mmap() calls the branch fs's
->mmap().
This approach is simple and good, but there is one problem.
Under /proc, several entries show the mmap-ped files by its path (with
device and inode number), and the printed path will be the path on the
branch fs's instead of virtual aufs's.
This is not a problem in most cases, but some utilities lsof(1) (and its
user) may expect the path on aufs.

To address this issue, aufs adds a new member called vm_prfile in struct
vm_area_struct (and struct vm_region). The original vm_file points to
the file on the branch fs in order to handle everything correctly as
usual. The new vm_prfile points to a virtual file in aufs, and the
show-functions in procfs refers to vm_prfile if it is set.
Also we need to maintain several other places where touching vm_file
such like
- fork()/clone() copies vma and the reference count of vm_file is
  incremented.
- merging vma maintains the ref count too.

This is not a good approach. It just faking the printed path. But it
leaves all behaviour around f_mapping unchanged. This is surely an
advantage.
Actually aufs had adopted another complicated approach which calls
generic_file_mmap() and handles struct vm_operations_struct. In this
approach, aufs met a hard problem and I could not solve it without
switching the approach.
