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Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 02:42:07 +1000
From: Andrew Morton <andrewm@uow.edu.au>
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To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
CC: Neil Brown <neilb@cse.unsw.edu.au>, Mike Black <mblack@csihq.com>,
        lkml <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, ext2-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: raid5d, page_launder and scheduling latency
In-Reply-To: <3B507380.79381536@uow.edu.au> from "Andrew Morton" at Jul 15, 2001 02:29:52 AM <E15LSMl-0001Pk-00@the-village.bc.nu>
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Alan Cox wrote:
> 
> > Happily, we've just fixed the four most gross sources of poor
> > interactivity in the kernel, so let's knock over some of the others as
> > well - a few /proc functions.  That mainly leaves zap_page_range() and
> > exit() with a lot of open files.
> 
> Nowhere near it. We have to fix copy_*_user and strlen_user (there are reasons
> 2.2 uses strnlen_user). Map the same page into 2Gig of address space filled with
> non zero bytes. Map a zero terminator on the end of it. Pass pointers to this
> for all your args and do an exec().

By "interactivity" I mean "things which make it feel jerky".
The commonly occurring things, not the oddball corner cases.

- huge reads from /dev/mem
- exit with 1,000 files open
- exit with half a million pages to be zapped

And "fixing" copy_*_user is outright dumb.  Just fix the four
or five places where it matters.

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