Recent woes with some arches needing their own pgd_addr_end macro; and 4-level
clear_page_range regression since 2.6.10's clear_page_tables; and its
long-standing well-known inefficiency in searching throughout the higher-level
page tables for those few entries to clear and free: all can be blamed on
ignoring the list of vmas when we free page tables.
Replace exit_mmap's clear_page_range of the total user address space by
free_pgtables operating on the mm's vma list; unmap_region use it in the same
way, giving floor and ceiling beyond which it may not free tables. This
brings lmbench fork/exec/sh numbers back to 2.6.10 (unless preempt is enabled,
in which case latency fixes spoil unmap_vmas throughput).
Beware: the do_mmap_pgoff driver failure case must now use unmap_region
instead of zap_page_range, since a page table might have been allocated, and
can only be freed while it is touched by some vma.
Move free_pgtables from mmap.c to memory.c, where its lower levels are adapted
from the clear_page_range levels. (Most of free_pgtables' old code was
actually for a non-existent case, prev not properly set up, dating from before
hch gave us split_vma.) Pass mmu_gather** in the public interfaces, since we
might want to add latency lockdrops later; but no attempt to do so yet, going
by vma should itself reduce latency.
But what if is_hugepage_only_range? Those ia64 and ppc64 cases need careful
examination: put that off until a later patch of the series.
What of x86_64's 32bit vdso page __map_syscall32 maps outside any vma?
And the range to sparc64's flush_tlb_pgtables? It's less clear to me now that
we need to do more than is done here - every PMD_SIZE ever occupied will be
flushed, do we really have to flush every PGDIR_SIZE ever partially occupied?
A shame to complicate it unnecessarily.
Special thanks to David Miller for time spent repairing my ceilings.
projects / linux-2.6 / commit