Concurrent page-fault handling with per-VMA locks

Posted Sep 16, 2022 2:15 UTC (Fri) by kiryl (subscriber, #41516)
Parent article: Concurrent page-fault handling with per-VMA locks

Do Emacs and gnome-shell suffer from scalability issues? If so, I believe the problem is on the other side of syscall.

Workloads that require extreme scaling (databases, VMMs, etc) tend to have one or a few very hot VMAs and per-VMA locking would not bring any help.

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Concurrent page-fault handling with per-VMA locks

Posted Sep 16, 2022 7:28 UTC (Fri) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

The reason Emacs uses so many VMAs is the new Emacs Lisp Native Compilation feature introduced in version 28.1. Each Emacs Lisp file (.el) can be compiled into a byte-code file (.elc), which in turn can be compiled into a .eln file, which is a standard shared object file with a different file name suffix. (On Windows the files are DLLs.)

Loading a lot of Emacs Lisp libraries can result in a zillion shared objects being loaded, each with their own VMAs.