LinuxMM:

Kelley Nielsen

Email: MailTo(kelleynnn AT SPAMFREE gmail DOT com)

I am a kernel intern through the Gnome Outreach Program for Women. RikvanRiel is my mentor. My project is to rid the swapoff code of the quadratic complexity in try_to_unuse().

This page will eventually become a proper home page, but until I learn enough about wiki editing to write proper articles, I will be using this as a scratch area for my thoughts, questions, and article stubs and drafts.

My Current Working State

Rik has asked me, "can you find out, and describe to me, how the location of a certain place in swap is stored in the memory management data structures for a process? and what the two parts of the swap information describe?

Dec. 10: What I’ve learned:

There is often no way to know which task is using a certain page. It’s not important.

One of the main data structures that I need to understand, both in terms of how it works and how it is used, is struct mm_struct. There is a list of them (the struct holds a struct list_head), and they can be swapped. The short file init_mm.c instantiates the list handle, called init_mm. This structure seems to be the principal structure representing an access into the swap area.

A struct mm_struct holds a list of struct vm_area_structs. (note: although the struct vm_area_struct contains a struct list_head, it also contains pointers to prev and next, which are declared before the struct list_head and may be more important). These are chunks of some type of memory.

Then, there is a struct page, defined in the same file as the struct mm_struct. These are also kept in a list (i.e. a struct page holds a struct list_head) (I don’t yet know where the handle is). A struct page holds (either) a struct address_space (or a slab object); not exactly sure what this does yet, but defined in the same file (fs.h) there is a struct address_space_operations. All the members of this struct are function pointers that seem to govern transitions between the states listed in fig. 2 here: http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/vm/

Dec. 11: What I’ve learned:


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LinuxMM: KelleyNielsen (last edited 2013-12-11 18:55:56 by c-76-103-52-179)