Re: [rfc] no ZERO_PAGE?

Andrea Arcangeli
2007-04-04T15:48:39Z

On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 08:35:30AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Anyway, I'm not against this, but I can see somebody actually *wanting*
> the ZERO page in some cases. I've used the fact for TLB testing, for
> example, by just doing a big malloc(), and knowing that the kernel will
> re-use the ZERO_PAGE so that I don't get any cache effects (well, at least
> not any *physical* cache effects. Virtually indexed cached will still show
> effects of it, of course, but I haven't cared).

Ok, those cases wanting the same zero page, could be fairly easily
converted to an mmap over /dev/zero (without having to run 4k large
mmap syscalls or nonlinear).