Re: Anticipatory prefaulting in the page fault handler V1

Dave Hansen
2004-12-08T17:55:26Z

On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 09:24, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> The page fault handler for anonymous pages can generate significant overhead
> apart from its essential function which is to clear and setup a new page
> table entry for a never accessed memory location. This overhead increases
> significantly in an SMP environment.

do_anonymous_page() is a relatively compact function at this point.
This would probably be a lot more readable if it was broken out into at
least another function or two that do_anonymous_page() calls into. That
way, you also get a much cleaner separation if anyone needs to turn it
off in the future.

Speaking of that, have you seen this impair performance on any other
workloads?

-- Dave