_SHARED, and any future "internal mode flags" are reserved from bit zero up, as they will never be passed in the upper bits of the mode argument of a mempolicy API. I set the MPOL_F_SHARED flag when the policy is installed in the shared policy rb-tree. Don't need/want to clear the flag when removing from the tree as the mempolicy is freed [unref'd] internally to the sp_delete() function. However, a task could hold another reference on this mempolicy from a prior lookup. We need the MPOL_F_SHARED flag to stay put so that any tasks holding a ref will unref, eventually freeing, the mempolicy. A later patch in this series will introduce a function to conditionally unref [mpol_free] a policy. The MPOL_F_SHARED flag is one reason [currently the only reason] to unref/free a policy via the conditional free. Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: David Rientjes Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Andi Kleen Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds ¨IÉ