[PATCH] mm: tracking shared dirty pages

Tracking of dirty pages in shared writeable mmap()s.

The idea is simple: write protect clean shared writeable pages, catch the
write-fault, make writeable and set dirty.  On page write-back clean all the
PTE dirty bits and write protect them once again.

The implementation is a tad harder, mainly because the default
backing_dev_info capabilities were too loosely maintained.  Hence it is not
enough to test the backing_dev_info for cap_account_dirty.

The current heuristic is as follows, a VMA is eligible when:
 - its shared writeable
    (vm_flags & (VM_WRITE|VM_SHARED)) == (VM_WRITE|VM_SHARED)
 - it is not a 'special' mapping
    (vm_flags & (VM_PFNMAP|VM_INSERTPAGE)) == 0
 - the backing_dev_info is cap_account_dirty
    mapping_cap_account_dirty(vma->vm_file->f_mapping)
 - f_op->mmap() didn't change the default page protection

Page from remap_pfn_range() are explicitly excluded because their COW
semantics are already horrid enough (see vm_normal_page() in do_wp_page()) and
because they don't have a backing store anyway.

mprotect() is taught about the new behaviour as well.  However it overrides
the last condition.

Cleaning the pages on write-back is done with page_mkclean() a new rmap call.
It can be called on any page, but is currently only implemented for mapped
pages, if the page is found the be of a VMA that accounts dirty pages it will
also wrprotect the PTE.

Finally, in fs/buffers.c:try_to_free_buffers(); remove clear_page_dirty() from
under ->private_lock.  This seems to be safe, since ->private_lock is used to
serialize access to the buffers, not the page itself.  This is needed because
clear_page_dirty() will call into page_mkclean() and would thereby violate
locking order.

[dhowells@redhat.com: Provide a page_mkclean() implementation for NOMMU]
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 14 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/rmap.h b/include/linux/rmap.h
index bf97b0900014..db2c1df4fef9 100644
--- a/include/linux/rmap.h
+++ b/include/linux/rmap.h
@@ -103,6 +103,14 @@ pte_t *page_check_address(struct page *, struct mm_struct *,
  */
 unsigned long page_address_in_vma(struct page *, struct vm_area_struct *);
 
+/*
+ * Cleans the PTEs of shared mappings.
+ * (and since clean PTEs should also be readonly, write protects them too)
+ *
+ * returns the number of cleaned PTEs.
+ */
+int page_mkclean(struct page *);
+
 #else   /* !CONFIG_MMU */
 
 #define anon_vma_init()         do {} while (0)
@@ -112,6 +120,12 @@ unsigned long page_address_in_vma(struct page *, struct vm_area_struct *);
 #define page_referenced(page,l) TestClearPageReferenced(page)
 #define try_to_unmap(page, refs) SWAP_FAIL
 
+static inline int page_mkclean(struct page *page)
+{
+        return 0;
+}
+
+
 #endif  /* CONFIG_MMU */
 
 /*