[$] Toward better handling of major page faults
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May 22, 2026
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. During the memory-management track at the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Barry Song led a session to try, yet again, to find an enduring solution to this problem.
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