Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 23 May 2004 18:19:56 -0400 | From | Jeff Garzik <> | Subject | Re: Linux 2.6.7-rc1 |
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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
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