ws us to update only BITS_PER_LONG pages at once, we need to iterate over the dirty bitmap until every dirty bit is cleared again for the next call. Although some people may worry about the problem of using the atomic memory instruction many times to the concurrently accessible bitmap, it is usually accessed with mmu_lock held and we rarely see concurrent accesses: so what we need to care about is the pure xchg() overheads. Another point to note is that we do not use for_each_set_bit() to check which ones in each BITS_PER_LONG pages are actually dirty. Instead we simply use __ffs() in a loop. This is much faster than repeatedly call find_next_bit(). Performance: The dirty-log-perf unit test showed nice improvements, some times faster than before, except for some extreme cases; for such cases the speed of getting dirty page information is much faster than we process it in the userspace. For real workloads, both VGA and live migration, we have observed pure improvements: when the guest was reading a file during live migration, we originally saw a few ms of latency, but with the new method the latency was less than 200us. Signed-off-by: Takuya Yoshikawa Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity ¦. Øž/x