Re: [PATCH 5/5] mm: mark stable page dirty in KSM

[Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 07:23:12PM -0700, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Oct 2015, Minchan Kim wrote:
> 
> > Stable page could be shared by several processes and last process
> > could own the page among them after CoW or zapping for every process
> > except last process happens. Then, page table entry of the page
> > in last process can have no dirty bit and PG_dirty flag in page->flags.
> > In this case, MADV_FREE could discard the page wrongly.
> > For preventing it, we mark stable page dirty.
> 
> I agree with the change, but found that comment (repeated in the source)
> rather hard to follow.  And it doesn't really do justice to the changes
> you have made.
> 
> This is not now a MADV_FREE thing, it's more general than that, even
> if MADV_FREE is the only thing that takes advantage of it.  I like
> very much that you've made page reclaim sane, freeing non-dirty
> anonymous pages instead of swapping them out, without having to
> think of whether it's for MADV_FREE or not.
> 
> Would you mind if we replace your patch by a re-commented version?
> 
> [PATCH] mm: mark stable page dirty in KSM
> 
> The MADV_FREE patchset changes page reclaim to simply free a clean
> anonymous page with no dirty ptes, instead of swapping it out; but
> KSM uses clean write-protected ptes to reference the stable ksm page.
> So be sure to mark that page dirty, so it's never mistakenly discarded.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>

Looks better than mine.
I will include this in my patchset when I respin.

Thanks!

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