This series introduces some important infrastructure work. The overall result
is that:
1. We now support XIP backed filesystems using memory that have no
struct page allocated to them. And patches 6 and 7 actually implement
this for s390.
This is pretty important in a number of cases. As far as I understand,
in the case of virtualisation (eg. s390), each guest may mount a
readonly copy of the same filesystem (eg. the distro). Currently,
guests need to allocate struct pages for this image. So if you have
100 guests, you already need to allocate more memory for the struct
pages than the size of the image. I think. (Carsten?)
For other (eg. embedded) systems, you may have a very large non-
volatile filesystem. If you have to have struct pages for this, then
your RAM consumption will go up proportionally to fs size. Even
though it is just a small proportion, the RAM can be much more costly
eg in terms of power, so every KB less that Linux uses makes it more
attractive to a lot of these guys.
2. VM_MIXEDMAP allows us to support mappings where you actually do want
to refcount _some_ pages in the mapping, but not others, and support
COW on arbitrary (non-linear) mappings. Jared needs this for his NVRAM
filesystem in progress. Future iterations of this filesystem will
most likely want to migrate pages between pagecache and XIP backing,
which is where the requirement for mixed (some refcounted, some not)
comes from.
3. pte_special also has a peripheral usage that I need for my lockless
get_user_pages patch. That was shown to speed up "oltp" on db2 by
10% on a 2 socket system, which is kind of significant because they
scrounge for months to try to find 0.1% improvement on these
workloads. I'm hoping we might finally be faster than AIX on
pSeries with this :). My reference to lockless get_user_pages is not
meant to justify this patchset (which doesn't include lockless gup),
but just to show that pte_special is not some s390 specific thing that
should be hidden in arch code or xip code: I definitely want to use it
on at least x86 and powerpc as well.
This patch:
Introduce a new type of mapping, VM_MIXEDMAP. This is unlike VM_PFNMAP in
that it can support COW mappings of arbitrary ranges including ranges without
struct page *and* ranges with a struct page that we actually want to refcount
(PFNMAP can only support COW in those cases where the un-COW-ed translations
are mapped linearly in the virtual address, and can only support non
refcounted ranges).
VM_MIXEDMAP achieves this by refcounting all pfn_valid pages, and not
refcounting !pfn_valid pages (which is not an option for VM_PFNMAP, because it
needs to avoid refcounting pfn_valid pages eg. for /dev/mem mappings).
Signed-off-by: Jared Hulbert <jaredeh@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Acked-by: Carsten Otte <cotte@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Jared Hulbert <jaredeh@gmail.com>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
b379d79019