Re: [PATCH v3] mm: thp: Set the accessed flag for old pages onaccess fault.

From: Johannes Weiner
Date: Thu Oct 25 2012 - 15:51:14 EST


On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 05:44:31PM +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
> On x86 memory accesses to pages without the ACCESSED flag set result in the
> ACCESSED flag being set automatically. With the ARM architecture a page access
> fault is raised instead (and it will continue to be raised until the ACCESSED
> flag is set for the appropriate PTE/PMD).
>
> For normal memory pages, handle_pte_fault will call pte_mkyoung (effectively
> setting the ACCESSED flag). For transparent huge pages, pmd_mkyoung will only
> be called for a write fault.
>
> This patch ensures that faults on transparent hugepages which do not result
> in a CoW update the access flags for the faulting pmd.
>
> Cc: Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@xxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

> Ok chaps, I rebased this thing onto today's next (which basically
> necessitated a rewrite) so I've reluctantly dropped my acks and kindly
> ask if you could eyeball the new code, especially where the locking is
> concerned. In the numa code (do_huge_pmd_prot_none), Peter checks again
> that the page is not splitting, but I can't see why that is required.

I don't either. If the thing was splitting when the fault happened,
that path is not taken. And the locked pmd_same() check should rule
out splitting setting in after testing pmd_trans_huge_splitting().

Peter?
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