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mm: preemptibility -v3

From:  Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
To:  Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>, Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, akpm@linux-foundation.org, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Subject:  [PATCH 00/28] mm: preemptibility -v3
Date:  Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:06:54 +0200
Message-ID:  <20100607110654.606530953@chello.nl>
Cc:  linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-arch@vger.kernel.org, Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>, David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>, Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>, Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>, Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>, Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>, "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Archive-link:  Article, Thread

This patch-set makes part of the mm a lot more preemptible. It converts
i_mmap_lock and anon_vma->lock to mutexes and makes mmu_gather fully
preemptible.

The main motivation was making mm_take_all_locks() preemptible, since it
appears people are nesting hundreds of spinlocks there.

The side-effects are that can finally make mmu_gather preemptible,
something which lots of people have wanted to do for a long time.

It also gets us anon_vma refcounting, which seems to result in a nice
cleanup of the anon_vma lifetime rules wrt KSM and compaction.

This patch-set it build and boot-tested on x86_64 (a previous version was
also tested on Dave's Niagra2 machines, and I suppose s390 did too when
Martin provided the conversion patch for his arch).

There are no known architectures left unconverted, although some arch code
never did see a compiler (superh and um come to mind).

Can we move this work forwards, or is there anything people would want to
see done?

[ The series includes Rik's latest patches to the same area for
convenience ]


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