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authorNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>2008-07-25 19:45:30 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2008-07-26 12:00:06 -0700
commite286781d5f2e9c846e012a39653a166e9d31777d (patch)
tree14958fe6d8f3e0459c96c68b3034ea2433ab85ac /README
parent47feff2c8eefe85099f87c43d3096855f0085ca0 (diff)
mm: speculative page references
If we can be sure that elevating the page_count on a pagecache page will pin it, we can speculatively run this operation, and subsequently check to see if we hit the right page rather than relying on holding a lock or otherwise pinning a reference to the page. This can be done if get_page/put_page behaves consistently throughout the whole tree (ie. if we "get" the page after it has been used for something else, we must be able to free it with a put_page). Actually, there is a period where the count behaves differently: when the page is free or if it is a constituent page of a compound page. We need an atomic_inc_not_zero operation to ensure we don't try to grab the page in either case. This patch introduces the core locking protocol to the pagecache (ie. adds page_cache_get_speculative, and tweaks some update-side code to make it work). Thanks to Hugh for pointing out an improvement to the algorithm setting page_count to zero when we have control of all references, in order to hold off speculative getters. [kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com: fix migration_entry_wait()] [hugh@veritas.com: fix add_to_page_cache] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: repair a comment] Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de> Cc: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org> Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@us.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp> Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Acked-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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