On Sun, Dec 19, 2021 at 1:12 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Can we get rid of ->mapcount altogether? Three states:
> - Not mapped
> - Mapped exactly once
> - Possibly mapped more than once
I don't think even that is useful. We should get rid of mapcount entirely.
It doesn't actually help to know "mapped exactly once", exactly
because even when that's true, there may be non-mapped references to
the page.
Mapped references really aren't that special in general.
One case where it *can* be special is on virtually indexed cache
architectures, where "is this mapped anywhere else" can be an issue
for cache flushing.
There the page_mapcount() can actually really matter, but it's such an
odd case that I'm not convinced it should be something the kernel VM
code should bend over backwards for.
And the count could be useful for 'rmap' operations, where you can
stop walking the rmap once you've found all mapped cases (paghe
migration being one case of this). But again, I'm not convinced the
serialization is worth it, or that it's a noticeable win.
However, I'm not 100% convinced it's worth it even there, and I'm not
sure we necessarily use it there.
So in general, I think page_mapcount() can be useful as a count for
those things that are _literally_ about "where is this page mapped".
Page migration, virtual cache coherency, things like that can
literally be about "how many different virtual mappings can we find".
It's just that pages can have a number of non-mapped users too, so
mapcount isn't all that meaningful in general.
And you can look it up with rmap too, and so I do think it would be
worth discussing whether we really should strive to maintain
'mapcount' at all.
> I appreciate "Not mapped" is not a state that anon pages can
> meaningfully have (maybe when they go into the swap cache?)
Absolutely. And we can keep references around to an anonymous page
even without it having any mapping or swap cache at all (ie "gup +
unmap").
So "Not mapped at all" is a possible case, without the page being free'd.
Linus
