From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263679AbUEWWUQ (ORCPT ); Sun, 23 May 2004 18:20:16 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263685AbUEWWUQ (ORCPT ); Sun, 23 May 2004 18:20:16 -0400 Received: from parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk ([195.92.249.252]:25315 "EHLO www.linux.org.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263679AbUEWWUK (ORCPT ); Sun, 23 May 2004 18:20:10 -0400 Message-ID: <40B1238C.6060605@pobox.com> Date: Sun, 23 May 2004 18:19:56 -0400 From: Jeff Garzik User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040510 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: William Lee Irwin III CC: Horst von Brand , Linus Torvalds , Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Linux 2.6.7-rc1 References: <200405231619.i4NGJBe18903@pincoya.inf.utfsm.cl> <40B0EE6C.70400@pobox.com> <20040523211154.GC1833@holomorphy.com> <40B1180F.8000501@pobox.com> <20040523215330.GG1833@holomorphy.com> In-Reply-To: <20040523215330.GG1833@holomorphy.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org William Lee Irwin III wrote: > William Lee Irwin III wrote: > >>>I wouldn't qualify either of the major VM patch series merged as >>>rewrites. I saw: >>>(1) move unmapping function/helpers to different algorithm to save space >>>(2) NUMA API and support functions > > > On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 05:30:55PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote: > >>You missed the pte chains going away, a fundamental change in the way >>reverse mapping is done? > > > (1) describes that in more detail than "pte_chains going away". It's > just a search algorithm. For anonymous pages, anon_vma just strobes > offsets into vma inheritance chains, and anonmm just strobes vaddrs in > all forks between execs, for file-backed memory they both use ->i_mmap. > Yes, they can both be summarized in the same sentence. The scope of the > changes are very limited and the presentation of them is a very clearly > documented and incremental series of small changes. You're getting lost in the details... the scope of the anonvma change is _everybody_. If you accept the premise that we are in a _stable_ kernel series, the core goal should be stability. Non-trivial VM changes like this do not enhance stability in the short term, even if they are a good idea in the long run. It's the whole idea behind minimizing changes and breakage in a stable series. You've got all the major Linux vendors preparing (or releasing) 2.6.x-based product and IMO the 2.6 kernel is still a moving target, with non-trivial behavior (and sometimes API) changes every couple of kernel versions. Jeff