hex filename 3285925 568506 1304616 5159047 4eb887 vmlinux 3285797 568506 1304616 5158919 4eb807 vmlinux.patched I was unable to measure a stable difference in the number of cpu cycles spent in blockdev_direct_IO() when pushing aio+dio 256K reads at ~340MB/s. So the resulting intent of the patch isn't a performance gain but to avoid exposing ourselves to the risk of finding another field like .map_bh.b_state where we rely on zeroing but don't enforce it in the code. Zach surmised that zeroing out the page array was what caused most of the problem, and suggested the approach taken in the attached patch for resolving the issue. Intel re-tested with this patch and saw a 0.6% performance gain (the original regression was 0.5%). [akpm@linux-foundation.org: add comment] Signed-off-by: Jeff Moyer Acked-by: Zach Brown Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds 5ò·è“&x