On Sat, 13 Oct 2001, Jamie Lokier wrote:
>
> In fact it was proposed here on this list years ago, and I think you
> argued against it (TLB flush costs). The costs and kernel
> infrastructure have changed and maybe the idea could be revisited now.
It's still not entirely unlikely that doing VM mappings is simply more
expensive than just doing a memcpy. The TLB invalidate is only part of the
issue - you also have the page table walk, the VM lock, and the fact that
PAGE_COPY itself ends up being overhead.
Which is why the PAGE_COPY kind of read() optimization is _probably_ only
worth it if the user asks for it directly (or automatically only for large
reads together with single-threaded applications).
The explicit flag is probably a good idea also because of usage patterns
(PAGE_COPY is a slowdown _if_ the file is actually written to or even
mapped shared).
Linus
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 15 2001 - 21:00:50 EST