From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753701AbaDWCvq (ORCPT ); Tue, 22 Apr 2014 22:51:46 -0400 Received: from terminus.zytor.com ([198.137.202.10]:58235 "EHLO mail.zytor.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751485AbaDWCvp (ORCPT ); Tue, 22 Apr 2014 22:51:45 -0400 Message-ID: <53572AAA.4070207@zytor.com> Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 19:51:22 -0700 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.4.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Linus Torvalds CC: Ingo Molnar , Thomas Gleixner , Linux Kernel Mailing List , "linux-mm@kvack.org" Subject: Re: Why do we set _PAGE_DIRTY for page tables? References: <5356FCC1.6060807@zytor.com> In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Version: 1.6 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 04/22/2014 07:48 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 4:35 PM, H. Peter Anvin wrote: >> I just noticed this: >> >> #define _PAGE_TABLE (_PAGE_PRESENT | _PAGE_RW | _PAGE_USER | \ >> _PAGE_ACCESSED | _PAGE_DIRTY) >> #define _KERNPG_TABLE (_PAGE_PRESENT | _PAGE_RW | _PAGE_ACCESSED | \ >> _PAGE_DIRTY) >> >> Is there a reason we set _PAGE_DIRTY for page tables? It has no >> function, but doesn't do any harm either (the dirty bit is ignored for >> page tables)... it just looks funny to me. > > I think it just got copied, and at least the A bit does matter even in > page tables (well, it gets updated, I don't know how much that > "matters"). So the fact that D is ignored is actually the odd man out. > Yes, not setting the A bit means the hardware will take an assist to set the bit for us, which is a waste of time if we don't care about it. The D bit is the one which made me wonder; I thought either it was just copy & paste, or that it got set to make it more analogous with large pages. -hpa