[PATCH V2 2/2] powerpc/thp: Serialize pmd clear against a linux page table walk.

[Andrew Morton]

On Thu,  7 May 2015 12:53:28 +0530 "Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:

> Serialize against find_linux_pte_or_hugepte which does lock-less
> lookup in page tables with local interrupts disabled. For huge pages
> it casts pmd_t to pte_t. Since format of pte_t is different from
> pmd_t we want to prevent transit from pmd pointing to page table
> to pmd pointing to huge page (and back) while interrupts are disabled.
> We clear pmd to possibly replace it with page table pointer in
> different code paths. So make sure we wait for the parallel
> find_linux_pte_or_hugepage to finish.

I'm not seeing here any description of the problem which is being
fixed.  Does the patch make the machine faster?  Does the machine
crash?