LWN: Comments on "Working-set protection for anonymous pages"

Working-set protection for anonymous pages

admalledd — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 16:14:24 +0000

Seems to be an axiom of source code: when you ask "why is <thing> this way" you will invariably find that you were the one in the distant (or not) past who wrote it.

Just yesterday at work we had a horrible bug from code written in 2006 finally surface. The developer who was investigating and fixing eventually wondered who wrote the buggy code in the first place (while also trying to dig up notes on why it was written how it was at all). Turned out to be one of her first projects when she was hired right out of college and no one else had touched it since.

To credit, it did basically work for about fifteen years without major issue until now.

Working-set protection for anonymous pages

LtWorf — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 09:41:49 +0000

Good that this area is getting some attention.

Working-set protection for anonymous pages

unixbhaskar — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 06:48:52 +0000

>>"He asked: "One wonders why on earth we weren't doing these things in the first place?" Kim replied with copies of the patches adding the current behavior in 2002 — written by a certain Andrew Morton, who acknowledged that it may well be time to revisit some of that work."