If we add a new flag so that we can distinguish between the first page and the
tail pages then we can avoid to use page->private in the first page.
page->private == page for the first page, so there is no real information in
there.
Freeing up page->private makes the use of compound pages more transparent.
They become more usable like real pages. Right now we have to be careful f.e.
if we are going beyond PAGE_SIZE allocations in the slab on i386 because we
can then no longer use the private field. This is one of the issues that
cause us not to support debugging for page size slabs in SLAB.
Having page->private available for SLUB would allow more meta information in
the page struct. I can probably avoid the 16 bit ints that I have in there
right now.
Also if page->private is available then a compound page may be equipped with
buffer heads. This may free up the way for filesystems to support larger
blocks than page size.
We add PageTail as an alias of PageReclaim. Compound pages cannot currently
be reclaimed. Because of the alias one needs to check PageCompound first.
The RFC for the this approach was discussed at
http://marc.info/?t=117574302800001&r=1&w=2
[nacc@us.ibm.com: fix hugetlbfs]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Introduce a VM_BUG_ON, which is turned on with CONFIG_DEBUG_VM. Use this
in the lightweight, inline refcounting functions; PageLRU and PageActive
checks in vmscan, because they're pretty well confined to vmscan. And in
page allocate/free fastpaths which can be the hottest parts of the kernel
for kbuilds.
Unlike BUG_ON, VM_BUG_ON must not be used to execute statements with
side-effects, and should not be used outside core mm code.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
set_page_count usage outside mm/ is limited to setting the refcount to 1.
Remove set_page_count from outside mm/, and replace those users with
init_page_count() and set_page_refcounted().
This allows more debug checking, and tighter control on how code is allowed
to play around with page->_count.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Now that compound page handling is properly fixed in the VM, move nommu
over to using compound pages rather than rolling their own refcounting.
nommu vm page refcounting is broken anyway, but there is no need to have
divergent code in the core VM now, nor when it gets fixed.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
(Needs testing, please).
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Remove __put_page from outside the core mm/. It is dangerous because it does
not handle compound pages nicely, and misses 1->0 transitions. If a user
later appears that really needs the extra speed we can reevaluate.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The attached patch cleans up the way the bootmem allocator frees pages.
A new function, __free_pages_bootmem(), is provided in mm/page_alloc.c that is
called from mm/bootmem.c to turn pages over to the main allocator. All the
bits of code to initialise pages (clearing PG_reserved and setting the page
count) are moved to here. The checks on page validity are removed, on the
assumption that the struct page arrays will have been prepared correctly.
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Christoph Lameter
Nick Piggin
David Howells
Nick Piggin
Linus Torvalds