From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from d12nrmr1607.megacenter.de.ibm.com (d12nrmr1607.megacenter.de.ibm.com [9.149.167.49]) by mtagate3.de.ibm.com (8.13.7/8.13.7) with ESMTP id k7OETCBS013118 for ; Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:29:12 GMT Received: from d12av02.megacenter.de.ibm.com (d12av02.megacenter.de.ibm.com [9.149.165.228]) by d12nrmr1607.megacenter.de.ibm.com (8.13.6/8.13.6/NCO v8.1.1) with ESMTP id k7OEXGRu3100902 for ; Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:33:16 +0200 Received: from d12av02.megacenter.de.ibm.com (loopback [127.0.0.1]) by d12av02.megacenter.de.ibm.com (8.12.11.20060308/8.13.3) with ESMTP id k7OETC4T014716 for ; Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:29:12 +0200 Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:29:11 +0200 From: Martin Schwidefsky Subject: Guest page hinting patches. Message-ID: <20060824142911.GA12127@skybase> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: linux-mm@kvack.org, akpm@osdl.org, nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au Cc: frankeh@watson.ibm.com, rhim@cc.gatech.edu List-ID: Fourth version of the guest page hinting patches. The code has been polished and another race has been fixed (keep fingers crossed that is has been that last one this time). The basic idea of guest page hinting is to give a host system which virtualizes the memory of its guest systems on a per page basis usage information for the guest pages. The host can then use this information to optimize the management of guest pages, in particular the paging. This optimizations can be used for unused (free) guest pages, for clean page cache pages, and for clean swap cache pages. The content of free pages can be replace with zeroes and the content of clean page cache / swap cache pages can be reloaded by the guest from the backing store. There are 9 patches that implement guest page hinting: 1) Guest page state changes for free pages. 2) s390 exploitation of state changes for free pages. 3) Guest page state changes for page cache pages. 4) Guest page state changes for swap cache pages. 5) Keep mlocked pages in stable state. 6) Add support for writable page table entries. 7) Optimization for minor faults. 8) Discarded page list. 9) full s390 architecture support for guest page hinting. The first two patches are independent from the other seven. These two just deal with unused/free vs. used/stable pages. The code starts to get interesting with patch #03.. Any objections against pushing patch #01 and patch #02 into the -mm tree? The code runs well on s390 and does nothing for all other archs. Patches are against 2.6.18-rc4-mm2. -- blue skies, Martin. Martin Schwidefsky Linux for zSeries Development & Services IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH "Reality continues to ruin my life." - Calvin. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org