From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S934212AbXGMBHP (ORCPT ); Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:07:15 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1760005AbXGMBHA (ORCPT ); Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:07:00 -0400 Received: from cantor2.suse.de ([195.135.220.15]:52613 "EHLO mx2.suse.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1759531AbXGMBHA (ORCPT ); Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:07:00 -0400 Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 03:06:34 +0200 From: Andrea Arcangeli To: Matt Mackall Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: RFC: CONFIG_PAGE_SHIFT (aka software PAGE_SIZE) Message-ID: <20070713010634.GM28613@v2.random> References: <20070706222651.GG5777@v2.random> <20070712175308.GW11166@waste.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20070712175308.GW11166@waste.org> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 12:53:09PM -0500, Matt Mackall wrote: > On Sat, Jul 07, 2007 at 12:26:51AM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > > The original idea of having a software page size larger than a > > hardware page size, originated at SUSE by myself and Andi Kleen while > > helping AMD to design their amd64 cpu, > > Original? This was done on VAXen and in Mach ages ago. I know nothing about that ancient stuff, but I've to trust you on this. > On Linux, there've already been two implementations, one by Hugh > Dickens and an expanded version by Bill Irwin (presented at OLS in > 2003). > > Bill's patch was notable for going to heroic efforts to maintain > binary compatibility, basically separating the userspace notion of the > ABI's page size from the kernel's. How's your version fair here? The events I referred to happened well before Bill's effort. I admit I also started having some doubt about the correctness of my above statement when I read Hugh's patch dated Jul 2001 in the last few days, I'm now uncertain when Hugh's effort started, probably many months before he published his code. Overall I definitely shooted myself in the foot ;), because 1) I don't actually care that much about the attribution of the idea (I wrote it only as a side note), 2) we're in open source intellectual property destruction land anyway so it doesn't matter who had the idea. Apologies. The way I felt while writing that side note, was that the time has come to do what we had planned a long time ago, I simply didn't care too much if VAXen or other ancient OS had it working before, sorry.