Nov 13 – 15, 2018
America/Vancouver timezone

Reducing the number of users of mmap_sem

Nov 14, 2018, 12:00 PM
15m
Pavillion/Ballroom-C (Sheraton Vancouver Wall Center)

Pavillion/Ballroom-C

Sheraton Vancouver Wall Center

58

Speaker

Yang Shi (Alibaba Group)

Description

The mmap_sem has long been a contention point in the memory management
subsystem. In this session some mmap_sem related topics will be
discussed. Some optimization has been merged by the upstream kernel to
solve holding mmap_sem for write for excessive period of time in
munmap path by downgrading write mmap_sem to read. And, some
optimization are under discussion on the mailing list, i.e. release
mmap_sem earlier for page cache readahead, speculative page fault.
There is still optimization room by figuring out just what mmap_sem
protects. It covers access to many fields in the mm_struct structure.
It is also used for the virtual memory area (VMA) red-black tree, the
process VMA list, and various fields within the VMA structure itself.
Finer grain locks might be better to replace mmap_sem to reduce
contention, i.e. range lock or per vma lock.

Presentation materials

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