Re: [patch] 'sticky pages' support in the VM, futex-2.5.38-C5

[Ingo Molnar]

On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Well, we have two situations:
>  - the page is shared. In which case we don't need to put it on any 
>    pinning list, since the very sharedness of the page means that we won't
>    be COW'ing it in this address space.
>  - the page is private. In which case we can (and should) pre-COW it and 
>    make it anonymous at futex time.
> 
> So yeah, it should be doable.

well, 4 fields: ->mapping, ->list.next, ->list.prev, ->index and ->private
is *alot* of space to do something smart in struct page itself.

(hm, dont we have named anonymous mappings? (ie. mmap()-ing of a file via
MAP_PRIVATE?) And if a futex is put there it can be COW-ed, right, while
it's also in the pagecache?)

assuming those 4 fields are available, it should be easy for the futex
code to detect such mappings - the ->mapping field should be a good test,
if it's NULL then it's a COW-able page, if it's non-NULL then not.

then eg. the ->private field could be used as a simple PG_sticky counter.

or, to implement real lazy COW, the ->private field could be used as an
'owner MM' pointer, and if the COW handler sees current->mm == owner_mm,
then the ->list has a queue of pending page_change_struct's, which would
trigger a rehashing of the futexes. Then PG_sticky is cleared.

this would work fine as long as the pin_page code guarantees to never put
a hash on an already COW-ed page. (which can be guaranteed by using the
'writable' flag to get_user_pages())

no additional hashes. Is there any danger in going into this direction?

	Ingo