Mastering Linux Kernel Development

Mapping

Another important element of the page descriptor is a pointer *mapping of type struct address_space. However, this is one of the tricky pointers which might either refer to an instance of struct address_space, or to an instance of struct anon_vma. Before we get into details of how this is achieved, let's first understand the importance of those structures and the resources they represent.

Filesystems engage free pages( from page cache) to cache data of recently accessed disk files. This mechanism helps minimize disk I/O operations: when file data in the cache is modified, the appropriate page is marked dirty by setting the PG_dirty bit; all dirty pages are written to the corresponding disk block by scheduling disk I/O at strategic ...