It's common practice to msync a large address range regularly, in which
often only a few ptes have actually been dirtied since the previous pass.
sync_pte_range then goes much faster if it tests whether pte is dirty
before locating and accessing each struct page cacheline; and it is hardly
slowed by ptep_clear_flush_dirty repeating that test in the opposite case,
when every pte actually is dirty.
But beware, s390's pte_dirty always says false, since its dirty bit is kept
in the storage key, located via the struct page address. So skip this
optimization in its case: use a pte_maybe_dirty macro which just says true
if page_test_and_clear_dirty is implemented.
projects / linux-2.6 / commit