LKML News v6.8-rc7

[PATCH 1/1] mm/madvise: enhance lazyfreeing with mTHP in madvise_free (Lance Yang)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240225123215.86503-1-ioworker0@gmail.com

Lance improves madvise_free_pte_range() to handle large folios that smaller than PMD-size and optimizes lazy-free of PTE-mapped smaller than PMD-size THPs using this patch.

[RFC PATCH] mm: Add reclaim type to memory.reclaim (Yafang Shao)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240225114204.50459-1-laoar.shao@gmail.com

This RFC patch extends memory.reclaim memcg file to receive type of memory to reclaim. It supports pagecache only, slabs only, and both.

[LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] mm/mempolicy extentions for heterogeneous memory systems (Gregory Price)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/Zd2PFXSzYuMMxiQj@memverge.com

Gregory proposes an LSFMM topic for discussion of mm/mempolicy extension ideas and ongoing works for efficient management of heterogeneous memory such as CXL based ones.

[RFC PATCH v2 0/7] DAMON based 2-tier memory management for CXL memory (Honggyu Kim)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240226140555.1615-1-honggyu.kim@sk.com

Honggyu revised their patchset for extending DAMOS to support promotion/demotion for their heterogeneous memory SDK. They argue the DAMON-based approach improves performance about 15-17% to 4-5% compared to the default memory policy.

[LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] untorn buffered writes (Theodore Ts’o)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240228061257.GA106651@mit.edu

Ted propose an LSF/MM topic for discussing the best interface as buffered, untorn writes and what would be needed for the support.

[GIT PULL] hotfixes for 6.8-rc7 (Andrew Morton)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240227145619.40b2f9b33dc2723df27f68c0@linux-foundation.org

Andrw sent hotfixes for Linux v6.8-rc7.

[LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] Reclamation interactions with RCU (Paul E. McKenney)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/c6321dd1-ec0e-4fed-87cc-50d297d2be30@paulmck-laptop

Paul proposes an LSFMM topic for discussing mutual understanding between memory reclaim and RCU.

[LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] Sharing page tables across processes (mshare) (Khalid Aziz)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/ac4411f4-5faa-4df7-8d19-b2f62e10e0c9@oracle.com

Sharing pages among processes cannot get the advantage of sharing pages among threds, since the amount of memory consumed by page tables can exceed the size of the share data. Khalid sent proposals and patches for this problem that allows sharing page tables among processes, and proposes an LSFMM topic for further discussions.

[LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] Address Space Isolation (Brendan Jackman)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CA+i-1C169s8pyqZDx+iSnFmftmGfssdQA29+pYm-gqySAYWgpg@mail.gmail.com

Brendan proposes an LSFMM topic for sharing progress of address space isolation, which helps protecting sensitive data from CPU vulnerabilities, and discuss chanllenges.

[PATCH 0/3] kci-gitlab: Introducing GitLab-CI Pipeline for Kernel Testing (Helen Koike)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240228225527.1052240-1-helen.koike@collabora.com

Helen posted this patchset for making kernel CI without any need for specific infrastructure. A demo video and rendered documentation are available.

[LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] Swap Abstraction “the pony” (Chris Li)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CAF8kJuMQ7qBZqdHHS52jRyA-ETTfHnPv+V9ChaBsJ_q_G801Lw@mail.gmail.com

Chris suggests a continued discussion of VFS-like swap system as yet another LSFMM topic. It aims to re-architect the whole swap backend from the scratch.

[LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] TAO: THP Allocator Optimizations (Yu Zhao)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240229183436.4110845-1-yuzhao@google.com

Yu proposes yet another LSFMM topic for THP improvement with a patchset. It introduces THP zones, shattering of THP, and struct page optimization for THP which resembles that of HugeTLB.

[PATCH v2] mm/vmstat: Add order’s information for extfrag_index and unusable_index (Hao Ge)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240229141443.99408-1-gehao@kylinos.cn

Hao posted a patch for adding order information to extfrag/extfrag_index under the debugfs for better understanding of the situation.

Linux 6.8-rc7 (Linus Torvalds)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CAHk-=wgwt9b3yMxAQRCVJ0Jh6-4Dz1Fgo2au7g_U9VWVxXoS6Q@mail.gmail.com

The seventh release candidate for 6.8-rc7 is released. The week was pretty calm, as much as Linus wanted. Linus therefore says we’ll have the final 6.8 next weekend unless some bad surprosies happen.

Below is the diffstat of the releases in the last two years.

Note that the y-axis is in logarithm. I draw it using https://github.com/sjp38/relstat and https://github.com/sjp38/lazybox using below command:

$ relstat.py --since 2022-03-04 | ~/lazybox/gnuplot/plot.py \
    --data_fmt table --type labeled-lines --xtics_rotate -90 \
    --font "Times New Roman, 5pt" --ylog --pointsize 0.3

And, below is the diffstat of the -rc7 releases in the last two years.