Re: [PATCH] Snapshot of shared page tables

[Dave McCracken]

--On Thursday, October 03, 2002 08:39:20 +1000 Paul Mackerras
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> Interesting.  I notice that you are using the _PAGE_RW bit in the
> PMDs.  Are you relying on the hardware to do anything with that bit,
> or is it only used by software?
> 
> (If you are relying on the hardware to do something different when
> _PAGE_RW is clear in the PMD, then your approach isn't portable.)

Yes, I am relying on the hardware.  I was under the impression that it was
pretty much universal that making the pmd read-only would make the hardware
treat all ptes under it as read-only.  This came out of a discussion on
lkml last winter where this assertion was made.

Do you know of a page table-based architecture that doesn't have and honor
read-only protections at the pmd level?

Dave McCracken

======================================================================
Dave McCracken          IBM Linux Base Kernel Team      1-512-838-3059
[e-mail]                                        T/L   678-3059