On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 1:27 PM, Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> Yes, you don't do the page table copies. Fine. But you leave vma with >> the the anon_vma pointer - doesn't that mean that it's still >> connected >> to the original anonvma chain, and we might end up swapping something >> in? > > Swapping something in would require there to be a swap entry in > the page table entries, which we are not copying, so this should > not be a correctness issue. Yeah, I thought the rmap code just used the offset from the start to avoid even doing swap entries, but I guess we don't actually ever populate the page tables without the swap entry being there. > There is another test in copy_page_range already which ends up > skipping the page table copy when it should not be done. Well, the VM_DONTCOPY test is in dup_mmap(), and I think I'd rather match up the VM_WIPEONFORK logic with VM_DONTCOPY than with the copy_page_range() tests. Because I assume you are talking about the "if it's a shared mapping, we don't need to copy the page tables and can just do it at page fault time instead" part? That's a rather different thing, which isn't so much about semantics, as about just a trade-off about when to touch the page tables. But yes, that one *might* make sense in dup_mmap() too. I just don't think it's really analogous to the WIPEONFORK and DONTCOPY tests. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html