mm/cow: don't bother write protecting already write-protected pages
This is not normally noticeable, but repeated forks are unnecessarily expensive because they repeatedly dirty the parent page tables during the page table copy operation. It's trivial to just avoid write protecting the page table entry if it was already not writable. This patch was inspired by https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200447 which points to an ancient "waste time re-doing fork" issue in the presence of lots of signals. That bug was fixed by Eric Biederman's signal handling series culminating in commit c3ad2c3b ("signal: Don't restart fork when signals come in"), but the unnecessary work for repeated forks is still work just fixing, particularly since the fix is trivial. Cc: Eric Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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