• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    mm: use helper functions for allocating and freeing vm_area structs · 3928d4f5
    Linus Torvalds authored
    The vm_area_struct is one of the most fundamental memory management
    objects, but the management of it is entirely open-coded evertwhere,
    ranging from allocation and freeing (using kmem_cache_[z]alloc and
    kmem_cache_free) to initializing all the fields.
    
    We want to unify this in order to end up having some unified
    initialization of the vmas, and the first step to this is to at least
    have basic allocation functions.
    
    Right now those functions are literally just wrappers around the
    kmem_cache_*() calls.  This is a purely mechanical conversion:
    
        # new vma:
        kmem_cache_zalloc(vm_area_cachep, GFP_KERNEL) -> vm_area_alloc()
    
        # copy old vma
        kmem_cache_alloc(vm_area_cachep, GFP_KERNEL) -> vm_area_dup(old)
    
        # free vma
        kmem_cache_free(vm_area_cachep, vma) -> vm_area_free(vma)
    
    to the point where the old vma passed in to the vm_area_dup() function
    isn't even used yet (because I've left all the old manual initialization
    alone).
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    3928d4f5
fork.c 60.7 KB