Re: Performance regression in write() syscall

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Tue Feb 24 2009 - 11:13:56 EST



* Andi Kleen <andi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 06:03:04PM -0800, Salman Qazi wrote:

> > - return __copy_user_nocache(dst, src, size, 1);
> > + if (likely(size >= PAGE_SIZE))
> > + return __copy_user_nocache(dst, src, size, 1);
> > + else
> > + return __copy_from_user(dst, src, size);
>
> I think you disabled it completely, the kernel never really
> does any copies larger than page size because all its internal
> objects are page sized only.

No, look again, it's not disabled completely - the check now
basically special-cases 4K writes _only_, and makes them
non-temporal. That still covers the big/midsize file case.

And that kind of 4K limit makes a lot of sense. A small file
write will unlikely to have a perfect 4K sized copy. Big file
writes (and raw/direct IO related copies, etc.) will be chunked
down to 4K sized units.

Ingo
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