lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2004]   [May]   [23]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: Linux 2.6.7-rc1
William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>
>>>I wouldn't qualify either of the major VM patch series merged as
>>>rewrites. I saw:
>>>(1) move unmapping function/helpers to different algorithm to save space
>>>(2) NUMA API and support functions
>
>
> On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 05:30:55PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
>>You missed the pte chains going away, a fundamental change in the way
>>reverse mapping is done?
>
>
> (1) describes that in more detail than "pte_chains going away". It's
> just a search algorithm. For anonymous pages, anon_vma just strobes
> offsets into vma inheritance chains, and anonmm just strobes vaddrs in
> all forks between execs, for file-backed memory they both use ->i_mmap.
> Yes, they can both be summarized in the same sentence. The scope of the
> changes are very limited and the presentation of them is a very clearly
> documented and incremental series of small changes.


You're getting lost in the details... the scope of the anonvma change
is _everybody_. If you accept the premise that we are in a _stable_
kernel series, the core goal should be stability. Non-trivial VM
changes like this do not enhance stability in the short term, even if
they are a good idea in the long run. It's the whole idea behind
minimizing changes and breakage in a stable series.

You've got all the major Linux vendors preparing (or releasing)
2.6.x-based product and IMO the 2.6 kernel is still a moving target,
with non-trivial behavior (and sometimes API) changes every couple of
kernel versions.

Jeff


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 14:03    [W:0.044 / U:0.028 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site