• March 26

  [$] The state of the page in 2025

  

  lwn.net

  The folio transition is one of the most fundamental kernel changes ever made; it can be...

  The folio transition is one of the most fundamental kernel changes ever made; it can be thought of as being similar to replacing the foundation of a building while it remains open for business. So it is not surprising that, for some years, the annual Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit has included a session on the state of this transition. The 2025...

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More like this (3)

• April 21

  [$] Indirect calls in BPF

  

  lwn.net

  Anton Protopopov kicked off the BPF track on the second day of the 2025 Linux Storage,...

  Anton Protopopov kicked off the BPF track on the second day of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with a discussion about permitting indirect calls in BPF. He also spoke about his continuing work on static keys, a topic which is related because the implementation of indirect jumps and static keys in the verifier use some of the same mechanisms for...

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• April 16

  [$] Improvements for the contiguous memory allocator

  

  lwn.net

  As a system runs, its memory becomes fragmented; it does not take long before the allocation...

  As a system runs, its memory becomes fragmented; it does not take long before the allocation of large, physically contiguous memory ranges becomes difficult or impossible. The contiguous memory allocator (CMA) is a kernel subsystem that attempts to address this problem, but it has never worked as well as some would like. Two sessions in the memory-management track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,...

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• March 17

  [$] Looking forward to mapcount madness 2025

  

  lwn.net

  One of the many important tasks that the kernel's memory-management subsystem must handle is keeping track...

  One of the many important tasks that the kernel's memory-management subsystem must handle is keeping track of how pages of memory are mapped into the address spaces of the processes running on the system. As long as mappings to a given page exist, that page must be kept in place. As it turns out, tracking these mappings is harder than it seems it should...

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