Re: [PATCH 23/32] Generic dynamic per cpu refcounting

From: Tejun Heo
Date: Fri Feb 08 2013 - 09:44:33 EST


(cc'ing Andrew)

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 06:00:02PM -0800, Kent Overstreet wrote:
> This implements a refcount with similar semantics to
> atomic_get()/atomic_dec_and_test(), that starts out as just an atomic_t
> but dynamically switches to per cpu refcounting when the rate of
> gets/puts becomes too high.
>
> It also implements two stage shutdown, as we need it to tear down the
> percpu counts. Before dropping the initial refcount, you must call
> percpu_ref_kill(); this puts the refcount in "shutting down mode" and
> switches back to a single atomic refcount with the appropriate barriers
> (synchronize_rcu()).
>
> It's also legal to call percpu_ref_kill() multiple times - it only
> returns true once, so callers don't have to reimplement shutdown
> synchronization.
>
> For the sake of simplicity/efficiency, the heuristic is pretty simple -
> it just switches to percpu refcounting if there are more than x gets
> in one second (completely arbitrarily, 4096).
>
> It'd be more correct to count the number of cache misses or something
> else more profile driven, but doing so would require accessing the
> shared ref twice per get - by just counting the number of gets(), we can
> stick that counter in the high bits of the refcount and increment both
> with a single atomic64_add(). But I expect this'll be good enough in
> practice.
>
> Signed-off-by: Kent Overstreet <koverstreet@xxxxxxxxxx>

What's the status of this series? The percpu-refcnt part is still
going through review and the merge window is opening up pretty soon.
Kent, Andrew?

Thanks.

--
tejun
--
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/