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

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>]

On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 03:45:24PM -0800, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> 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.

sorry I didn't noticed the overlap of page->mapping to store the mm. But
yes, I should have realized that you had do because otherwise you
wouldn't know how to flush the tlb ;) so without the mm and address rmap
would be useless. So via the address and mapping you can walk the
pagetables and reach it with lower complexity than w/o rmap. Still doing
the pagetable walk wouldn't be an huge increase in complexity but it
would increase the "computational" complexity of the algorithm.

> 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


Andrea