Commit 251b97f5 authored Jul 04, 2008 by Peter Zijlstra Committed by Linus Torvalds Jul 04, 2008

mm: dirty page accounting vs VM_MIXEDMAP



Dirty page accounting accurately measures the amound of dirty pages in
writable shared mappings by mapping the pages RO (as indicated by
vma_wants_writenotify).  We then trap on first write and call
set_page_dirty() on the page, after which we map the page RW and
continue execution.

When we launder dirty pages, we call clear_page_dirty_for_io() which
clears both the dirty flag, and maps the page RO again before we start
writeout so that the story can repeat itself.

vma_wants_writenotify() excludes VM_PFNMAP on the basis that we cannot
do the regular dirty page stuff on raw PFNs and the memory isn't going
anywhere anyway.

The recently introduced VM_MIXEDMAP mixes both !pfn_valid() and
pfn_valid() pages in a single mapping.

We can't do dirty page accounting on !pfn_valid() pages as stated
above, and mapping them RO causes them to be COW'ed on write, which
breaks VM_SHARED semantics.

Excluding VM_MIXEDMAP in vma_wants_writenotify() would mean we don't do
the regular dirty page accounting for the pfn_valid() pages, which
would bring back all the head-aches from inaccurate dirty page
accounting.

So instead, we let the !pfn_valid() pages get mapped RO, but fix them
up unconditionally in the fault path.

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: "Jared Hulbert" <jaredeh@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

parent cde53535

mm/memory.c

+13 −1

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -1697,8 +1697,19 @@ static int do_wp_page(struct mm_struct mm, struct vm_area_struct vma,
		struct page *dirty_page = NULL;

		old_page = vm_normal_page(vma, address, orig_pte);
		if (!old_page)
		if (!old_page) {
		/*
		* VM_MIXEDMAP !pfn_valid() case
		*
		* We should not cow pages in a shared writeable mapping.
		* Just mark the pages writable as we can't do any dirty
		* accounting on raw pfn maps.
		*/
		if ((vma->vm_flags & (VM_WRITE\|VM_SHARED)) ==
		(VM_WRITE\|VM_SHARED))
		goto reuse;
		goto gotten;
		}

		/*
		* Take out anonymous pages first, anonymous shared vmas are
		@@ -1751,6 +1762,7 @@ static int do_wp_page(struct mm_struct mm, struct vm_area_struct vma,
		}

		if (reuse) {
		reuse:
		flush_cache_page(vma, address, pte_pfn(orig_pte));
		entry = pte_mkyoung(orig_pte);
		entry = maybe_mkwrite(pte_mkdirty(entry), vma);

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