Documentation/vm/locking is a blast from the past. In the entire git
history, it has had precisely Three modifications. Two of those look to
be pure renames, and the third was from 2005.
The doc contains such gems as:
> The page_table_lock is grabbed while holding the
> kernel_lock spinning monitor.
> Page stealers hold kernel_lock to protect against a bunch of
> races.
Or this which talks about mmap_sem:
> 4. The exception to this rule is expand_stack, which just
> takes the read lock and the page_table_lock, this is ok
> because it doesn't really modify fields anybody relies on.
expand_stack() doesn't take any locks any more directly, and the
mmap_sem acquisition was long ago moved up in to the page fault
code itself.
It could be argued that we need to rewrite this, but it is
dangerous to leave it as-is. It will confuse more people than it
helps.
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Cc: Wanpeng Li <liwanp@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>