On Wednesday 21 February 2007 21:52, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

Add a set of accessors to pack, unpack and modify page table entries
(at all levels).  This allows a paravirt implementation to control the
contents of pgd/pmd/pte entries.  For example, Xen uses this to
convert the (pseudo-)physical address into a machine address when
populating a pagetable entry, and converting back to pphys address
when an entry is read.

Do you have some lmbench numbers before/after this change? 
iirc at least fork and exit do a lot of pte accesses in various forms.
If it's measurable it might be needed to patch those for the native case.

-Andi