[$] 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.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | LWN.net (Linux Weekly News) |
| Canonical URL | https://lwn.net/Articles/1073071/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 13:50:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T13:52:02.305Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T13:52:03.985Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 9vxRfxDpKV0N |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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).