As discussed in linux-mm, mlocking a shared, writable vma currently causes the corresponding pages to be marked as dirty and queued for writeback. This seems rather unnecessary given that the pages are not being actually modified during mlock. It is understood that for non-shared mappings (file or anon) we want to use a write fault in order to break COW, but there is just no such need for shared mappings. The first two patches in this series do not introduce any behavior change. The intent there is to make it obvious that dirtying file pages is only done in the (writable, shared) case. I think this clarifies the code, but I wouldn't mind dropping these two patches if there is no consensus about them. The last patch is where we actually avoid dirtying shared mappings during mlock. Note that as a side effect of this, we won't call page_mkwrite() for the mappings that define it, and won't be pre-allocating data blocks at the FS level if the mapped file was sparsely allocated. My understanding is that mlock does not need to provide such guarantee, as evidenced by the fact that it never did for the filesystems that don't define page_mkwrite() - including some common ones like ext3. However, I would like to gather feedback on this from filesystem people as a precaution. If this turns out to be a showstopper, maybe block preallocation can be added back on using a different interface. Large shared mlocks are getting significantly (>2x) faster in my tests, as the disk can be fully used for reading the file instead of having to share between this and writeback. Michel Lespinasse (3): do_wp_page: remove the 'reuse' flag do_wp_page: clarify dirty_page handling mlock: avoid dirtying pages and triggering writeback mm/memory.c | 90 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------------------- mm/mlock.c | 7 ++++- 2 files changed, 55 insertions(+), 42 deletions(-) -- 1.7.3.1 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom policy in Canada: sign http://dissolvethecrtc.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>