On Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:45:50 -0800
Suleiman Souhlal <[email protected]> wrote:
> [email protected] wrote:
> > From: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
> >
> > Accounting writes is fairly simple: whenever a process flips a page from clean
> > to dirty, we accuse it of having caused a write to underlying storage of
> > PAGE_CACHE_SIZE bytes.
>
> On architectures where dirtying a page doesn't cause a page fault (like i386), couldn't you end up billing the wrong process (in fact, I think that even on other archituctures set_page_dirty() doesn't get called immediately in the page fault handler)?
Yes, that would be a problem in 2.6.18 and earlier.
In 2.6.19 and later, we do take a fault when transitioning a page from
pte-clean to pte-dirty. That was done to get the dirty-page accounting
right - to avoid the all-of-memory-is-dirty-but-the-kernel-doesn't-know-it
problem.
> AFAICS, set_page_dirty() is mostly called when trying to unmap a page when trying to shrink LRU lists, and there is no guarantee that this happens under the process that dirtied it (in fact, the set_page_dirty() is often done by kswapd).
hm, that code is still there in zap_pte_range(). If all is well, that
set_page_dirty() call should never return true. Peter did, you ever test
for that?
(Well, it might return true in rare races, because zap_pte_range() doesn't
lock the pages)
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