I looked at the thing quickly, and there _is_ actually a reasonably quick
fix, and one that I would like to have for other reasons anyway: having
read-write semaphores.
We don't have them, but they should not be fundamentally any worse to
implement than the current semaphores are, and they have occasionally come
up as useful things to have. They would certainly fit the bill for this
particular problem very well (a page fault would get a read lock, while a
mmap() would get a write lock - multiple page faults can happen in
parallel).
The one race with multiple page faults that we have is handled nicely by
the page table spinlock, which we introduced for kswapd anyway..
Linus
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