Re: [GIT PULL] core kernel fixes

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Sat Jun 20 2009 - 16:27:44 EST



* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Jun 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> > On x86, the natural way to do what you want done is ONE SINGLE
> > INSTRUCTION! As far as I can tell, the above crazy function is 100%
> > equivalent to this:
> >
> > asm __inline__("lock ; addl $0,%0":"+m" (*uaddr): :"memory", "cc");
> >
> > which really makes me think that using "get_user_pages_fast()" for it is
> > some truly crazy crap.
>
> We could also take the opposite approach - knowing that this is called
> only when the page doesn't exist, and just doing
>
> down_read(mmap_sem)
> vma = find_vma(..)
> ret = VM_FAULT_ERROR;
> if (vma && vma->vm_start <= address)
> ret = handle_mm_fault(mm, vma, address, 1);
> up_read(mmap_sem);
> return (ret & VM_FAULT_ERROR) ? -EFAULT : 0;
>
> or something like that. Again, that looks saner than using
> get_user_pages() for this and then dropping the page.

We'll sort this out tomorrow, sorry about this.

( The other embarrasing bit is that i flagged this commit as bad
nine days ago - during review i noticed the same bad pattern of a
pointless get-put cycle ... but the commit stuck around and forgot
about it. Sloppy. )

Ingo
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/