Re: [mm PATCH v6 6/7] mm: Add reserved flag setting to set_page_links

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Wed Dec 05 2018 - 12:22:31 EST


On Fri 30-11-18 13:53:18, Alexander Duyck wrote:
> Modify the set_page_links function to include the setting of the reserved
> flag via a simple AND and OR operation. The motivation for this is the fact
> that the existing __set_bit call still seems to have effects on performance
> as replacing the call with the AND and OR can reduce initialization time.
>
> Looking over the assembly code before and after the change the main
> difference between the two is that the reserved bit is stored in a value
> that is generated outside of the main initialization loop and is then
> written with the other flags field values in one write to the page->flags
> value. Previously the generated value was written and then then a btsq
> instruction was issued.
>
> On my x86_64 test system with 3TB of persistent memory per node I saw the
> persistent memory initialization time on average drop from 23.49s to
> 19.12s per node.

I have tried to explain why the whole reserved bit doesn't make much
sense in this code several times already. You keep ignoring that and
that is highly annoying. Especially when you add a tricky code to
optimize something that is not really needed.

Based on that I am not going to waste my time on other patches in this
series to review and give feedback which might be ignored again.

--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs