[PATCH] mm: ZAP_BLOCK causes redundant work

The address based work estimate for unmapping (for lockbreak) is and always
was horribly inefficient for sparse mappings.  The problem is most simply
explained with an example:

If we find a pgd is clear, we still have to call into unmap_page_range
PGDIR_SIZE / ZAP_BLOCK_SIZE times, each time checking the clear pgd, in
order to progress the working address to the next pgd.

The fundamental way to solve the problem is to keep track of the end
address we've processed and pass it back to the higher layers.

From: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>

  Modification to completely get away from address based work estimate
  and instead use an abstract count, with a very small cost for empty
  entries as opposed to present pages.

  On 2.6.14-git2, ppc64, and CONFIG_PREEMPT=y, mapping and unmapping 1TB
  of virtual address space takes 1.69s; with the following patch applied,
  this operation can be done 1000 times in less than 0.01s

From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>

With...