Re: MM deadlock [was: Re: arca-vm-8...]

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Sun, 24 Jan 1999 16:27:51 -0800 (PST)


On Sun, 24 Jan 1999, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> Being able to throw out page tables is something that is going to be needed
> too. As far as I can see that does not mean complexity. The Linux VM is
> very clean in its page handling, there is almost nothing in the page tables
> that cannot be flushed or dumped to disk if need be.

There _is_ a major problem: being able to swap out page tables means that
the thing that swaps them out _has_ to own the mm semaphore.

That's the right thing to do anyway, but it means, for example, that the
_only_ process that can page stuff out would be kswapd.

Who knows? Maybe I should just bite the bullet and make that the rule,
then we could forget about all the extra recursive semaphore crap too. And
it has other advantages - it can speed up the page fault handler (which
right now has to get the kernel lock for certain situations).

Once that is done, paging out page tables is not really a problem.

> There are real cases where grab large linear block is needed.

Nobody has so far shown a reasonable implementation where this would be
possible.

Linus

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