Re: page fault scalability patch final : i386 tested, x86_64

David S. Miller
2004-09-01T05:22:24Z

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 14:24:50 +1000
Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> wrote:

> The removal of the page table lock has other more subtle side effects
> on ppc64 (and ppc32 too) that aren't trivial to solve. Typically, due
> to the way we use the hash table as a TLB cache.

True on sparc64 as well where the page table lock is what
synchronizes TLB context allocation for a process.
While the lock is held, we know that the TLB context cannot
change and this allows all kinds of TLB flush optimizations.

We also have the pseudo-invariant that flush_tlb_page() is
always called with the page table lock held.