Physical to virtual translation of user addresses (reverse mapping) has long been sought after to improve the pageout algorithms of the VM. An implementation was added to 2.6 that uses back pointers from each page to its mapping (pte chains). While pte chains do work, they add significant space overhead and significant time overhead during page mapping/unmapping and fork/exit.

I will describe an alternative method of reverse mapping based on the object each page belongs to. I will discuss the partial implementation I did last year as well as the work done by Hugh Dickins and Andrea Arcangelli to complete it. I will describe the current implementations, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and what plans if any there are for solutions to the remaining issues.

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