On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 22:47 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 22:24 +0100, Miklos Szeredi wrote: > > > I'm not liking this, its not a constant operation as the name implies. > > > > OK, I'll think of something better. > > > > > And it style is a bit out of line with the rest of rmap. > > > > > > The thing it actually does is page_mkclean(), all it doesn't do is > > > setting the pte read-only. > > > > > > I can understand you wanting to avoid the overhead of the minor faults > > > resulting from using page_mkclean(), but I'm not sure its worth it. > > > > It would be nice if the cost of MS_ASYNC wouldn't be too high. And I > > do have the feeling that minor faults are far more expensive than > > cleaning the dirty bit in the ptes. > > > > Do you have any numbers? > > None what so ever, but I always think of msync as a rare function > (infrequent when compared to (minor) faults overall). But I don't have > numbers backing that up either. > > Also, the radix tree scan you do isn't exactly cheap either. > > So what I was wondering is whether its worth optimizing this at the cost > of another rmap walker. (one with very dubious semantics at that - it > clears the pte dirty bit but doesn't particularly care about that nor > does it respect the PG_dirty / PTE dirty relation) What this functionality requires is that MS_ASYNC is a full barrier wrt. dirtyness. That is, we want to call set_page_dirty_mappig() as soon as we touch a page in a dirtying fashion after MS_{,A}SYNC gets called. Hence we need the full page_mkclean() functionality, otherwise we don't set AS_CMTIME again in time. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html