summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/mm/ksm.c
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorMike Rapoport <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>2018-04-24 09:40:22 +0300
committerJonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>2018-04-27 17:19:24 -0600
commit5a2ca3efe6a07a155674ccbe36ad66d0840ce2c1 (patch)
treec59d453ae58f0614e6c92b4b737ca1a9703605de /mm/ksm.c
parentb976583f881814195c7f0ddbc4c541c915e84ae0 (diff)
mm/ksm: docs: extend overview comment and make it "DOC:"
The existing comment provides a good overview of KSM implementation. Let's update it to reflect recent additions of "chain" and "dup" variants of the stable tree nodes and mark it as "DOC:" for inclusion into the KSM documentation. Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm/ksm.c')
-rw-r--r--mm/ksm.c19
1 files changed, 18 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/mm/ksm.c b/mm/ksm.c
index 16451a2bf712..7d6558f3bac9 100644
--- a/mm/ksm.c
+++ b/mm/ksm.c
@@ -51,7 +51,9 @@
#define DO_NUMA(x) do { } while (0)
#endif
-/*
+/**
+ * DOC: Overview
+ *
* A few notes about the KSM scanning process,
* to make it easier to understand the data structures below:
*
@@ -67,6 +69,21 @@
* this tree is fully assured to be working (except when pages are unmapped),
* and therefore this tree is called the stable tree.
*
+ * The stable tree node includes information required for reverse
+ * mapping from a KSM page to virtual addresses that map this page.
+ *
+ * In order to avoid large latencies of the rmap walks on KSM pages,
+ * KSM maintains two types of nodes in the stable tree:
+ *
+ * * the regular nodes that keep the reverse mapping structures in a
+ * linked list
+ * * the "chains" that link nodes ("dups") that represent the same
+ * write protected memory content, but each "dup" corresponds to a
+ * different KSM page copy of that content
+ *
+ * Internally, the regular nodes, "dups" and "chains" are represented
+ * using the same :c:type:`struct stable_node` structure.
+ *
* In addition to the stable tree, KSM uses a second data structure called the
* unstable tree: this tree holds pointers to pages which have been found to
* be "unchanged for a period of time". The unstable tree sorts these pages