Re: [PATCH -mm] vmscan: make mapped executable pages the first class citizen

From: Rik van Riel
Date: Sun May 10 2009 - 10:54:24 EST


Alan Cox wrote:
On Sun, 10 May 2009 18:36:19 +0900
KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't oppose this policy. PROT_EXEC seems good viewpoint.

I don't think it is that simple

Not only can it be abused but some systems such as java have large
PROT_EXEC mapped environments, as do many other JIT based languages.

On the file LRU side, or on the anon LRU side?

Secondly it moves the pressure from the storage volume holding the system
binaries and libraries to the swap device which already has to deal with
a lot of random (and thus expensive) I/O, as well as the users filestore
for mapped objects there - which may even be on a USB thumbdrive.

Preserving the PROT_EXEC pages over streaming IO should not
move much (if any) pressure from the file LRUs onto the
swap-backed (anon) LRUs.

I still think the focus is on the wrong thing. We shouldn't be trying to
micro-optimise page replacement guesswork - we should be macro-optimising
the resulting I/O performance.

Any ideas on how to achieve that? :)

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