Commit bf3f3bc5e734706730c12a323f9b2068052aa1f0

Authored by Nick Piggin
Committed by Linus Torvalds
1 parent 3340289ddf

mm: don't mark_page_accessed in fault path

Doing a mark_page_accessed at fault-time, then doing SetPageReferenced at
unmap-time if the pte is young has a number of problems.

mark_page_accessed is supposed to be roughly the equivalent of a young pte
for unmapped references. Unfortunately it doesn't come with any context:
after being called, reclaim doesn't know who or why the page was touched.

So calling mark_page_accessed not only adds extra lru or PG_referenced
manipulations for pages that are already going to have pte_young ptes anyway,
but it also adds these references which are difficult to work with from the
context of vma specific references (eg. MADV_SEQUENTIAL pte_young may not
wish to contribute to the page being referenced).

Then, simply doing SetPageReferenced when zapping a pte and finding it is
young, is not a really good solution either. SetPageReferenced does not
correctly promote the page to the active list for example. So after removing
mark_page_accessed from the fault path, several mmap()+touch+munmap() would
have a very different result from several read(2) calls for example, which
is not really desirable.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@saeurebad.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

Showing 2 changed files with 1 additions and 2 deletions Side-by-side Diff

... ... @@ -1530,7 +1530,6 @@
1530 1530 /*
1531 1531 * Found the page and have a reference on it.
1532 1532 */
1533   - mark_page_accessed(page);
1534 1533 ra->prev_pos = (loff_t)page->index << PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT;
1535 1534 vmf->page = page;
1536 1535 return ret | VM_FAULT_LOCKED;
... ... @@ -768,7 +768,7 @@
768 768 if (pte_dirty(ptent))
769 769 set_page_dirty(page);
770 770 if (pte_young(ptent))
771   - SetPageReferenced(page);
  771 + mark_page_accessed(page);
772 772 file_rss--;
773 773 }
774 774 page_remove_rmap(page, vma);