This patch-set makes part of the mm a lot more preemptible. It converts i_mmap_lock and anon_vma->lock to mutexes and makes mmu_gather fully preemptible. The main motivation was making mm_take_all_locks() preemptible, since it appears people are nesting hundreds of spinlocks there. The side-effects are that can finally make mmu_gather preemptible, something which lots of people have wanted to do for a long time. It also gets us anon_vma refcounting, which seems to result in a nice cleanup of the anon_vma lifetime rules wrt KSM and compaction. This patch-set is build and boot-tested on x86_64 (a previous version was also tested on Dave's Niagra2 machines, and I suppose s390 was too when Martin provided the conversion patch for his arch). There are no known architectures left unconverted. Yanmin ran the -v3 posting through the comprehensive Intel test farm and didn't find any regressions. ( Not included in this posting are the 4 Sparc64 patches that implement gup_fast, those can be applied separately after this series gets anywhere. ) The full series (including the Sparc64 gup_fast bits) also available in -git form from (against something post .38-rc2): git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/peterz/linux-2.6-mmu_preempt.git Changes since -v6: Suggested by Hugh: - reordered the patches - changed to GFP_NOWAIT | __GFP_NOWARN to allocate mmu_gather pages - s/lock/mutex/ for the spinlock to mutex conversion - removed all DEFINE_PER_CPU(struct mmu_gather, mmu_gather) remnants - split the i_mmap_lock and anon_vma->lock conversion - removed some KSM wrappers - avoid tlb_flush_mmu() while holding pte_lock Other: - remove the i_mmap_lock lockbreak in truncate (XXX) - arch/tile __pte_free_tlb() change TODO: - decide if we want to actually remove the i_mmap_lock lockbreak - figure out if LOCK vs MB works or add a smp_mb() to patch #23 - figure out what to do with sparc's tlb_batch lack of ->fullmm -- 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>