Re: [PATCH] fs: fcntl_setlease defies lease_init assumptions

From: Manfred Spraul
Date: Tue May 09 2006 - 02:24:18 EST


Christoph Lameter wrote:

On Mon, 8 May 2006, Pekka Enberg wrote:



I think it sounds like it's worth it, but I'm not going to really push it.


Sounds good to me. Andrew?



virt_to_page is not cheap on NUMA.



I know. But it was a design assumption when I wrote the slab allocator.
Acutally, it's not cheap on non-NUMA either. And the PageCompound() check adds an additional branch.

Probably the allocator should be rewritten, without relying on virt_to_page().
Any proposals how kfree and kmem_cache_free could locate the cachep pointer? That's the performance critical part.

Right's now it's
<<<
page = vir_to_page(objp)
if (unlikely(PageCompound(page)))
page = (struct page *)page_private(page);
cachep = (struct kmem_cache *)page->lru.next;
>>>

What about:
- switch from power of two kmalloc caches to slighly smaller caches.
- change the kmalloc(PAGE_SIZE) users to get_free_page(). get_free_page() is now fast, too.
- use cachep= *((struct kmem_cache **)(objp & 0xfff))

The result would be a few small restrictions: all objects must start in the first page of a slab (there are no exceptions on my 2.6.16 system), and PAGE_SIZE'd caches are very expensive. Replacing the names_cache with get_free_page is trivial. That leaves the pgd cache.

--
Manfred


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