JA: You continue to develop your VM, frequent
updates being made available. How has the VM changed since it was
part of the main kernel? How stable is it?Rik van Riel:The fact that my VM code is no longer in the kernel
has two positive effects. First I don’t have to worry too much
about stability or code freezes, I can just develop the code in the
direction of better quality without having to be afraid of changes.
Secondly I can integrate bugfixes much quicker.This has lead to my reverse mapping based VM becoming stable
within a few months of me picking it up again; it is now stable to
the point where it survives the kernel torture lab Bob Matthews is
running at RedHat and both Alan Cox and Michael Cohen have
integrated the patch into their kernel tree. I suspect the rmap VM
isn’t as fast as some of the other VM code out there, but it does
seem to hold up somewhat better in strange situations.