Messages in this thread | | | From | Andy Whitcroft <> | Subject | [PATCH 0/3] explicitly document overloaded page flags V2 | Date | Fri, 23 May 2008 17:33:01 +0100 |
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With the recent page flag reorganisation we have a single enum which defines the valid page flags and their values, nice and clear. However there are a number of bits which are overloaded by different subsystems. Firstly there is PG_owner_priv_1 which is used by filesystems and by XEN. Secondly both SLOB and SLUB use a couple of extra page bits to manage internal state for pages they own; both overlay other bits. All of these "aliases" are scattered about the source making it very hard for a reader to know if the bits are safe to rely on in all contexts; confusion here is bad.
As we now have a single place where the bits are clearly assigned it makes sense to clarify the reuse of bits by making the aliases explicit and visible with the original bit assignments. This patch creates explicit aliases within the enum itself for the overloaded bits, creates standard bit accessors PageFoo etc. and uses those throughout.
This version pulls the bit manipulation out to standard named page bit accessors as suggested by Christoph, it retains the explicit mapping to the overlayed bits. A fusion of both ideas. This has been SLUB and SLOB have been compile tested on x86_64 only, and SLUB boot tested. If people feel this is worth doing then I can run a fuller set of testing.
-apw
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