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Date:      Tue, 19 Sep 2000 06:15:20 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To:        mbendiks@eunet.no (Marius Bendiksen)
Cc:        stein@eecs.harvard.edu (Christopher Stein), freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: how mmap buffer writes handled?
Message-ID:  <200009190615.XAA13756@usr02.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.10009130324160.85482-100000@login-1.eunet.no> from "Marius Bendiksen" at Sep 13, 2000 03:27:25 AM

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> Most architectures that have an MMU, such as the x86, have a bit in their
> page tables or equivalent that will indicate whether a page has been
> modified since the last time that bit was cleared. This can be sampled and
> cleared in one go.
> 
> On architectures lacking an MMU, I think the logical approach would be to
> use some of the protection facilities or such to force an exception to be
> raised when accessing the page for write, and updating the statistics
> based on that.

An interesting exception to this is the 386, which will not cause
a write fault on a protected page when in protected mode.  That
means if the kernel craps on the page, it is not correctly seen
as being dirty.  If you look at the VM code, you will see that
the page is actually mapped elsewhere, and the page not present
fault is trapped, and then looked up in a translation table,  8-p.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.


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