Re: 2.6.22 -mm merge plans -- vm bugfixes

[Nick Piggin]

Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 11:32:23AM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
>
> > The attached patch gets performance up a bit by avoiding some
> > barriers and some cachelines:
> >
> > G5
> >         pagefault   fork          exec
> > 2.6.21   1.49-1.51   164.6-170.8   741.8-760.3
> > +patch   1.71-1.73   175.2-180.8   780.5-794.2
> > +patch2  1.61-1.63   169.8-175.0   748.6-757.0
> >
> > So that brings the fork/exec hits down to much less than 5%, and
> > would likely speed up other things that lock the page, like write
> > or page reclaim.
>
>
> Is that every fork/exec or just under certain cicumstances?
> A 5% regression on every fork/exec is not acceptable.

Well after patch2, G5 fork is 3% and exec is 1%, I'd say the P4
numbers will be improved as well with that patch. Then if we have
specific lock/unlock bitops, I hope it should reduce that further.

The overhead that is there should just be coming from the extra
overhead in the file backed fault handler. For noop fork/execs,
I think that tends to be more pronounced, it is hard to see any
difference on any non-micro benchmark.

The other thing is that I think there could be some cache effects
happening -- for example the exec numbers on the 2nd line are
disproportionately large.

It definitely isn't a good thing to drop performance anywhere
though, so I'll keep looking for improvements.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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