After more careful consideration, I don't see any reasons why page_table_lock is necessary for dealing with vmas. I found one spot in swapoff, but it was easily changed to mmap_sem. I've beat on this code and mjb has beat on this code with no problems. Here's the patch to remove it. Feel free to poke holes in it. Dave McCracken ====================================================================== Dave McCracken IBM Linux Base Kernel Team 1-512-838-3059 dmccr@us.ibm.com T/L 678-3059