Re: [mm][RFC][PATCH 0/11] mm accessor updates.

Avi Kivity
2009-12-18T17:01:01Z

On 12/18/2009 07:17 AM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
>> It is not about naming. The accessors hide the locking mechanism for
>> mmap_sem. Then you can change the locking in a central place.
>>
>> The locking may even become configurable later. Maybe an embedded solution
>> will want the existing scheme but dual quad socket may want a distributed
>> reference counter to avoid bouncing cachelines on faults.
>>
> Hiding the locking is pretty much the worst design decision one can make.
>
>

It does allow incremental updates. For example if we go with range
locks, the accessor turns into a range lock of the entire address space;
users can be converted one by one to use their true ranges in order of
importance.

--
I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this
signature is too narrow to contain.