Re: [PATCH] kallsyms data size reduction / lookup speedup

From: Paulo Marques
Date: Wed Aug 25 2004 - 18:44:41 EST


viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 08:09:33PM +0100, Paulo Marques wrote:

Matt Mackall wrote:

...

FYI, killing the seq_file stuff will likely prove unpopular. So you'll
want to do that in a separate patch. If it doesn't affect the way
you're handling compression, please repost your compression patch. I
have a few comments, but otherwise I think we should move forward with it.

I'm still not sure that the seq_file is the culprit, but doing
a 10000 symbol decompression in a user space application takes
about 340us, whereas doing a "time cat /proc/kallsyms > /dev/null"
gives approx. 0.2s! (this is all on a Pentium4 2.8GHz)

*If* the seq_file is the culprit, then I don't think removing
it (or improving it) will be unpopular.


If it really spends that much in seq_file, I bet anything that it got
*very* dumb iterator. Which should be fixable...

That is why I kept a big *If* in that sentence. I'm quite new to all
this, and I'm still reading a lot of source code.

If the culprit is in fact seq_file, and seq_file can be improved in a
way that works for everyone (not only kallsyms), then I also agree
that is is the way to go. But hunting this down might prove that the
problem is somewhere else. It is just too soon to draw conclusions.

--
Paulo Marques - www.grupopie.com
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/