Understanding the Linux Kernel, Second Edition

The Swap Cache

The swap cache is crucial to avoid race conditions among processes trying to access pages that are being swapped.

If a page is owned by a single process (or better, if the page belongs to an address space that is owned by one or more clone processes), there is just one race condition to be considered: the process attempts to address a page that is being swapped out. An array of semaphores, one per each page slot, could be used to block the process until the I/O data transfer completes.

In many cases, however, a page is owned by several processes. Again, the same array of semaphores could suffice to avoid race conditions, provided that the kernel is able to locate quickly all Page Table entries that refer to the page to be swapped out. Therefore, the kernel could ensure that either all processes see the same page frame or all of them see the swapped-out page identifier.

Unfortunately, there is no quick way in Linux 2.4 to derive from the page frame the list of processes that own it.^[110] Scanning all Page Table entries of all processes looking for an entry with a given physical address is very costly, and it is done only in rare occasions (for instance, when deactivating a swap area).

As a result, the same page may be swapped out for some processes and present in memory for others. The kernel avoids the race conditions induced by this peculiar scenario by means of the swap cache.

Before describing how the swap cache works, let’s recall when a page frame may be shared ...