Re: anon_vma RFC2

Hugh Dickins
2004-03-12T13:43:25Z

Thanks a lot for pointing us to your (last night's) patches, Andrea.

On Fri, 12 Mar 2004, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 10:28:42PM -0500, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> It's not that I didn't read anonmm patches from Hugh, I spent lots of
> time on those, they just were flawed and they couldn't handle mremap,
> he very well knows, see anobjrmap-5 for istance.

Flawed in what way? They handled mremap fine, but yes, used pte_chains
for that extraordinary case, just as pte_chains were used for nonlinear.
With pte_chains gone (hurrah! though nonlinear handling yet to come),
as you know, I've already suggested a better way to handle that case
(use tmpfs-style backing object).

> the vma merging isn't a problem, we need to rework the code anyways to
> allow the file merging in both mprotect and mremap (currently only mmap
> is capable of merging files, and in turn it's also the only one capable
> of merging anon_vmas). Any merging code that is currently capable of
> merging files is easy to teach about anon_vmas too, it's basically the
> same problem at merging.

You're paying too much attention to the (almost optional, though it can
have a devastating effect on vma usage, yes) issue of vma merging, but
what about the (mandatory) vma splitting? I see no sign of the tiresome
code I said you'd need for anonvma rather than anonmm, walking the pages
updating as.vma whenever vma changes e.g. when mprotecting or munmapping
some pages in the middle of a vma. Surely move_vma_start is not enough?

That's what led me to choose anonmm, which seems a lot simpler: the real
argument for anonvma is that it saves a find_vma per pte in try_to_unmap
(page_referenced doesn't need it): a good saving, but is it worth the
complication of the faster paths?

Hugh