Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Reading lwn.net’s weekly kernel page (subscribers only for this week, sorry), I ran across a link to the Object Based Reversed Mapping patch, aka objrmap. To summarize, objrmap differs from Rik van Riel’s rmap by tracking pte entries by page->mappging->vma, instead of special pte_chains. That left me curious, as I know that wli’s tree includes Anonymous objrmap, aka anobjrmap, which extends the objrmap implementation for anonymous pages, which don’t have an associated mapping! how does it work, then? Some googling later, I found Hugh Dickins’s anobjrmap patches (scroll down to memory management). Putting it very roughly, anobjrmap tracks anonymous pages by a new struct, anonmm, which is attached to the mm, and serves as the page’s mapping.

While I’m in a kernel mood, two more things: Peter Braam, one of the intermezzo hackers, CC’d me on a mail to Chen Yang, asking him to integrate my intermezzo patch of last night and send it on to Linus. Neat! Also, I wonder if the folks at work or haifux would be interested in a series of lectures on the 2.5 VM. A prerequisite for such a lecture is writing at least one reasonably sized VM patch, though.