| From: |
| KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> |
| To: |
| "linux-mm@kvack.org" <linux-mm@kvack.org> |
| Subject: |
| [RFC][PATCH 0/4] ZERO PAGE again v2 |
| Date: |
| Tue, 7 Jul 2009 16:51:01 +0900 |
| Message-ID: |
| <20090707165101.8c14b5ac.kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> |
| Cc: |
| npiggin@suse.de,
"hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk"
<hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>,
avi@redhat.com,
"akpm@linux-foundation.org"
<akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
torvalds@linux-foundation.org |
| Archive‑link: | |
Article |
Hi, this is ZERO_PAGE mapping revival patch v2.
ZERO PAGE was removed in 2.6.24 (=> http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/10/9/112)
and I had no objections.
In these days, at user support jobs, I noticed a few of customers
are making use of ZERO_PAGE intentionally...brutal mmap and scan, etc.
(For example, scanning big sparse table and save the contents.)
They are using RHEL4-5(before 2.6.18) then they don't notice that ZERO_PAGE
is gone, yet.
yes, I can say "ZERO PAGE is gone" to them in next generation distro.
Recently, a question comes to lkml (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/6/4/383
Maybe there are some users of ZERO_PAGE other than my customers.
So, can't we use ZERO_PAGE again ?
IIUC, the problem of ZERO_PAGE was
- reference count cache ping-pong
- complicated handling.
- the behavior page-fault-twice can make applications slow.
This patch is a trial to de-refcounted ZERO_PAGE.
This includes 4 patches.
[1/4] introduce pte_zero() at el.
[2/4] use ZERO_PAGE for READ fault in anonymous mapping.
[3/4] corner cases, get_user_pages()
[4/4] introduce get_user_pages_nozero().
I feel these patches needs to be clearer but includes almost all
messes we have to handle at using ZERO_PAGE again.
What I feel now is
a. technically, we can do because we did.
b. Considering maintenance, code's beauty etc.. ZERO_PAGE adds messes.
c. Very big benefits for some (a few?) users but no benefits to usual programs.
There are trade-off between b. and c.
Any comments are welcome.
-Kame
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