Re: [PATCH v7 1/4] spinlock: A new lockref structure for locklessupdate of refcount

From: Al Viro
Date: Sun Sep 01 2013 - 18:35:57 EST


On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 03:16:24PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Does not seem to matter. Still 66% mntput_no_expire, 31% path_init.
> And that lg_local_lock() takes 5-6% of CPU, pretty much all of which
> is that single xadd instruction that implements the spinlock.
>
> This is on /tmp, which is tmpfs. But I don't see how any of that could
> matter. "mntput()" does an unconditional call to mntput_no_expire(),
> and mntput_no_expire() does that br_read_lock() unconditionally too.
>
> Note that I'm talking about that "cheap" *read* lock being expensive.
> It's the local one, not the global one. So it's not what Waiman saw
> with the global lock. This is a local per-cpu thing.
>
> That read-lock is supposed to be very cheap - it's just a per-cpu
> spinlock. But it ends up being very expensive for some reason. I'm not
> quite sure why - I don't see any lg_global_lock() calls at all, so...
>
> I wonder if there is some false sharing going on. But I don't see that
> either, this is the percpu offset map afaik:
>
> 000000000000f560 d files_lglock_lock
> 000000000000f564 d nr_dentry
> 000000000000f568 d last_ino
> 000000000000f56c d nr_unused
> 000000000000f570 d nr_inodes
> 000000000000f574 d vfsmount_lock_lock
> 000000000000f580 d bh_accounting
>
> and I don't see anything there that would get cross-cpu accesses, so
> there shouldn't be any cacheline bouncing. That's the whole point of
> percpu variables, after all.

Hell knows... Are you sure you don't see br_write_lock() at all? I don't
see anything else that would cause cross-cpu traffic with that layout...
--
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/