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 Articles

Lesser important ones:

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:

My current questions & things I want to learn:


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LinuxMM: KelleyNielsen (last edited 2013-12-30 18:36:06 by 12)