Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.
Andrea Arcangeli
authored
Without a max deduplication limit for each KSM page, the list of the rmap_items associated to each stable_node can grow infinitely large. During the rmap walk each entry can take up to ~10usec to process because of IPIs for the TLB flushing (both for the primary MMU and the secondary MMUs with the MMU notifier). With only 16GB of address space shared in the same KSM page, that would amount to dozens of seconds of kernel runtime. A ~256 max deduplication factor will reduce the latencies of the rmap walks on KSM pages to order of a few msec. Just doing the cond_resched() during the rmap walks is not enough, the list size must have a limit too, otherwise the caller could get blocked in (schedule friendly) kernel computations for seconds, unexpectedly. There's room for optimization to significantly reduce the IPI delivery cost during the page_referenced(), but at least for page_migration in the KSM case (used by hard NUMA bindings, compacti...