Linux 5.4 Lands A Number Of Memory Management Fixes

While mid-way through the Linux 5.4 development cycle with RC4 due out on Sunday, a number of memory management fixes just hit the mainline kernel.

Andrew Morton's pull request was merged on Friday night and he noted, "Rather a lot of fixes, almost all affecting mm/"

Indeed there were memory management fixes in this pull ahead of 5.4-rc4. Changes include a zRAM race condition fix, avoiding access to uninitialized memory maps, allow dropping transparent huge-pages (THP) from the page cache, and other fixes in this area including the possibility of a kernel crash.

One worth specifically pointing out is this patch due to lruvec_page_state consuming a lot of CPU cycles on Linux 5.3 kernels with a database workload on large core count servers. That should be addressed now with this code for Linux 5.4.

The other busy MM activity for Linux 5.4 can be seen here.