Re: Maybe a VM bug in 2.4.18-18 from RH 8.0?

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:32:43AM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> but note that even with rmap you don't know the pmd that points to the
> pte that you want to relocate and for the anon pages you miss
> information about mm and virtual address where those pages are
> allocated, so basically rmap is useless for doing it, you need to do the
> pagetable walking ala swap_out, in turn it's not easier at all in 2.5
> than it could been in 2.4 (but of course this is a 2.5 thing only, I
> just want to say that if it's not difficult in 2.5 it wasn't difficult
> in 2.4 either).

Actually, we do. From include/asm-generic/rmap.h:

static inline void pgtable_add_rmap(struct page * page, struct mm_struct * mm, unsigned long address)
{
#ifdef BROKEN_PPC_PTE_ALLOC_ONE
	/* OK, so PPC calls pte_alloc() before mem_map[] is setup ... ;( */
	extern int mem_init_done;

	if (!mem_init_done)
		return;
#endif
	page->mapping = (void *)mm;
	page->index = address & ~((PTRS_PER_PTE * PAGE_SIZE) - 1);
	inc_page_state(nr_page_table_pages);
}

So pagetable pages are tagged with the right information, and in
principle could even be tagged here with the pmd in page->private.

These fields are actually required for use by try_to_unmap_one(),
and something similar could be done for a try_to_move_one(). This
information remains intact with shared pagetables, and is generalized
so that the PTE page is tagged with a list of mm's (the mm_chain),
and in that case no unique pmd could be directly stored in the page,
but it could just as easily be derived from the mm's in the mm_chain.

But there's no denying it would involve a substantial amount of work.


Bill