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Patch series "mm: remove vma_merge()", v3. The infamous vma_merge() function has been the cause of a great deal of pain, bugs and confusion for a very long time. It is subtle, contains many corner cases, tries to do far too much and is as a result very fragile. The fact that the function requires there to be a numbering system to cover each possible eventuality with references to each in the many branches of its implementation as to which case you are looking at speaks to all this. Some of this complexity is inherent - unfortunately there is no getting away from the need to figure out precisely how to execute the merge, whether we need to remove VMAs, whether it is safe to do so, what constitutes a mergeable VMA and so on. However, a lot of the complexity is not inherent but instead a product of the function's 'organic' development. Liam has gone to great lengths to improve the situation as a part of his maple tree implementation, greatly improving the readability of the code, and Vlastimil and myself have additionally gone to lengths to try to improve things further. However, with the availability of userland VMA testing, it now becomes possible to perform a rather more significant refactoring while maintaining confidence in its correct operation. An attempt was previously made by Vlastimil [0] to eliminate vma_merge(), however it was rather - brutal - and an astute reader might refer to the date of that patch for insight as to its intent. This series instead divides merge operations into two natural kinds - merges which occur when a NEW vma is being added to the address space, and merges which occur when a vma is being MODIFIED. Happily, the vma_expand() function introduced by Liam, which has the capacity for also deleting a subsequent VMA, covers each of the NEW vma cases. By abstracting the actual final commit of changes to a VMA to its own function, commit_merge() and writing a wrapper around vma_expand() for new VMA cases vma_merge_new_range(), we can avoid having to use vma_merge() for these instances altogether. By doing so we are also able to then de-duplicate all existing merge logic in mmap_region() and do_brk_flags() and have everything invoke this new function, so we universally take the same approach to merging new VMAs. Having done so, we can then completely rework vma_merge() into vma_merge_existing_range() and use this for the instances where a merge is proposed for a region of an existing VMA. This eliminates vma_merge() and its numbered cases and instead divides things into logical cases - merge both, merge left, merge right (the latter 2 being either partial or full merges). The code is heavily annotated with ASCII diagrams and greatly simplified in comparison to the existing vma_merge() function. Having made this change, we take the opportunity to address an issue with merging VMAs possessing a vm_ops->close() hook - commit |
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Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.