From: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>

Andrea Arcangeli's anon_vma object-based reverse mapping scheme for anonymous
pages.  Instead of tracking anonymous pages by pte_chains or by mm, this
tracks them by vma.  But because vmas are frequently split and merged
(particularly by mprotect), a page cannot point directly to its vma(s), but
instead to an anon_vma list of those vmas likely to contain the page - a list
on which vmas can easily be linked and unlinked as they come and go.  The vmas
on one list are all related, either by forking or by splitting.

This has three particular advantages over anonmm: that it can cope
effortlessly with mremap moves; and no longer needs page_table_lock to protect
an mm's vma tree, since try_to_unmap finds vmas via page -> anon_vma -> vma
instead of using find_vma; and should use less cpu for swapout since it can
locate its anonymous vmas more quickly.

It does have disadvantages too: a lot more change in mmap.c to deal with
anon_vmas, though small straightforward additions now that the vma merging has
been refactored there; more lowmem needed for each anon_vma and vma structure;
an additional restriction on the merging of vmas (cannot be merged if already
assigned different anon_vmas, since then their pages will be pointing to
different heads).

(There would be no need to enlarge the vma structure if anonymous pages
belonged only to anonymous vmas; but private file mappings accumulate
anonymous pages by copy-on-write, so need to be listed in both anon_vma and
prio_tree at the same time.  A different implementation could avoid that by
using anon_vmas only for purely anonymous vmas, and use the existing prio_tree
to locate cow pages - but that would involve a long search for each single
private copy, probably not a good idea.)

Where before the vm_pgoff of a purely anonymous (not file-backed) vma was
meaningless, now it represents the virtual start address at which that vma is
mapped - which the standard file pgoff manipulations treat linearly as vmas
are split and merged.  But if mremap moves the vma, then it generally carries
its original vm_pgoff to the new location, so pages shared with the old
location can still be found.  Magic.

Hugh has massaged it somewhat: building on the earlier rmap patches, this
patch is a fifth of the size of Andrea's original anon_vma patch.  Please note
that this posting will be his first sight of this patch, which he may or may
not approve.