thp: add pmd_huge_pte to mm_struct
authorAndrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Thu, 13 Jan 2011 23:46:45 +0000 (15:46 -0800)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Fri, 14 Jan 2011 01:32:41 +0000 (17:32 -0800)
commite7a00c45f29c0155007aa150bf231a70fa470365
tree3225a79905dede614ed44e98776cdc6285bbd28a
parent4e6af67e970a2ac287739a4c526c857b5bda27ec
thp: add pmd_huge_pte to mm_struct

This increase the size of the mm struct a bit but it is needed to
preallocate one pte for each hugepage so that split_huge_page will not
require a fail path.  Guarantee of success is a fundamental property of
split_huge_page to avoid decrasing swapping reliability and to avoid
adding -ENOMEM fail paths that would otherwise force the hugepage-unaware
VM code to learn rolling back in the middle of its pte mangling operations
(if something we need it to learn handling pmd_trans_huge natively rather
being capable of rollback).  When split_huge_page runs a pte is needed to
succeed the split, to map the newly splitted regular pages with a regular
pte.  This way all existing VM code remains backwards compatible by just
adding a split_huge_page* one liner.  The memory waste of those
preallocated ptes is negligible and so it is worth it.

Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
include/linux/mm_types.h
kernel/fork.c