[PATCH] mm: page_state opt docs

Comment the new locking rules for page_state statistics.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 11 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/page-flags.h b/include/linux/page-flags.h
index dede8d412dca..d52999c43336 100644
--- a/include/linux/page-flags.h
+++ b/include/linux/page-flags.h
@@ -79,13 +79,23 @@
 /*
  * Global page accounting.  One instance per CPU.  Only unsigned longs are
  * allowed.
+ *
+ * - Fields can be modified with xxx_page_state and xxx_page_state_zone at
+ * any time safely (which protects the instance from modification by
+ * interrupt.
+ * - The __xxx_page_state variants can be used safely when interrupts are
+ * disabled.
+ * - The __xxx_page_state variants can be used if the field is only
+ * modified from process context, or only modified from interrupt context.
+ * In this case, the field should be commented here.
  */
 struct page_state {
         unsigned long nr_dirty;         /* Dirty writeable pages */
         unsigned long nr_writeback;     /* Pages under writeback */
         unsigned long nr_unstable;      /* NFS unstable pages */
         unsigned long nr_page_table_pages;/* Pages used for pagetables */
-        unsigned long nr_mapped;        /* mapped into pagetables */
+        unsigned long nr_mapped;        /* mapped into pagetables.
+                                         * only modified from process context */
         unsigned long nr_slab;          /* In slab */
 #define GET_PAGE_STATE_LAST nr_slab