[$] Toward better handling of major page faults
The article discusses the challenges of handling major page faults in Linux, particularly when multiple threads generate these faults simultaneously. Barry Song led a session at the 2026 Linux Storage Summit to explore potential solutions to reduce lock contention during I/O operations. Various strategies were proposed, including modifying retry mechanisms and addressing priority inversion issues.
- ▪A major page fault occurs when a process accesses a page not present in RAM, leading to potential I/O delays.
- ▪Barry Song presented options to alleviate mmap_lock contention during fault handling at the 2026 Linux Storage Summit.
- ▪The discussion highlighted the complexity of fault-handling code and the need for different approaches for anonymous and file-backed pages.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
We're bad at marketing We can admit it, marketing is not our strong suit. Our strength is writing the kind of articles that developers, administrators, and free-software supporters depend on to know what is going on in the Linux world. Please subscribe today to help us keep doing that, and so we don’t have to get good at marketing. By Jonathan CorbetMay 22, 2026 LSFMM+BPF A major page fault occurs when a process attempts to access a page that is not currently present in RAM; satisfying such faults usually involves I/O, and can thus take some time. When many threads sharing an address space are generating page faults, the result can be significant lock contention while that I/O takes place.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at LWN.net (Linux Weekly News).