Reverse mapping VM comes to 2.5

Rik van Riel's reverse-mapping virtual memory implementation (RMAP) has been under development for several months; it has attracted some attention as a possible way of improving Linux VM performance in the future. Thus far, however, RMAP has only been available for the 2.4 series, so it has been hard to evaluate as a possible addition to 2.5.

That situation has just changed, however: Craig Kulesa decided to port RMAP to the 2.5.23 kernel. He posted it in two forms: a full port which makes many changes, and a minimal version which add only the reverse mapping code itself. Craig's preliminary benchmark results show a respectable performance improvement in 2.5.23 when the RMAP code is added in.

A much more serious benchmarking effort will have to be done before any real conclusions about RMAP in 2.5 can be drawn. This port, however, has attracted a fair amount of interest. If more detailed numbers can be obtained soon, RMAP in 2.5 should be an active area of discussion at next week's kernel summit.

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