On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:25:00 -0800 Jeremy Fitzhardinge [off-list ref] wrote:

Add a new mm function apply_to_page_range() which applies a given
function to every pte in a given virtual address range in a given mm
structure. This is a generic alternative to cut-and-pasting the Linux
idiomatic pagetable walking code in every place that a sequence of
PTEs must be accessed.

Although this interface is intended to be useful in a wide range of
situations, it is currently used specifically by several Xen
subsystems, for example: to ensure that pagetables have been allocated
for a virtual address range, and to construct batched special
pagetable update requests to map I/O memory (in ioremap()).

There was some discussion about this sort of thing last week.  The
consensus was that it's better to run the callback against a whole pmd's
worth of ptes, mainly to amortise the callback's cost (a lot).

It was implemented in
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.20/2.6.20-mm1/broken-out/smaps-extract-pmd-walker-from-smaps-code.patch