From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Al Viro Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCHSET] mremap/mmap mess Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 13:46:20 +0000 Message-ID: <20091209134620.GR14381@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> References: <20091208060701.GM14381@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> <20091208.130802.25121122.davem@davemloft.net> <20091208220638.GN14381@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from zeniv.linux.org.uk ([195.92.253.2]:58770 "EHLO ZenIV.linux.org.uk" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755911AbZLINqe (ORCPT ); Wed, 9 Dec 2009 08:46:34 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-arch-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: To: Hugh Dickins Cc: David Miller , Ollie Wild , Peter Zijlstra , Rik van Riel , viro@ftp.linux.org.uk, linux-arch@vger.kernel.org, torvalds@linux-foundation.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 11:43:57AM +0000, Hugh Dickins wrote: > ... my hair ;-) > I have to say, Dr Frankenstein, that this idea fills me with dread. > > I'm not saying it's impossible, but the resulting creature sounds like > it's going to be special in several easily-buggy hard-to-maintain ways. > > I think you already realize that shmem file pages (shared) live by > different rules from anonymous pages (COWed): they're both swappable, > but switching a group of pages from one to the other is going to be > weird new territory. (In fairness, my suggestion involves some > weird new territory too, but considerably less scary to me.) Umm... Note that these guys are considerably simpler than shmem; _nothing_ will have them mapped anywhere until after that eviction and nothing will modify their address_space in any way (no truncation, etc.). And no, I'm not particulary happy about the picture - the sight of, ahem, locking hierarcy rules in mm/filemap.c alone is a cause for dread. It had been a while since I'd done any serious RTFS on mm/*, so... Anyway, it's obviously *not* -rc1 fodder at the moment. So what I'm going to do is to leave that one as it is in mainline, push the rest of mmap/mremap stuff to Linus later today and get to VFS and audit queues. After the -rc1, OTOH...