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

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Fri Aug 30 2013 - 03:16:22 EST



* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > BTW. Do you have your test case at hand ?
>
> My test-case is a joke. It's explicitly *trying* to get as much
> contention as possible on a dentry, by just starting up a lot of threads
> that look up one single pathname (the same one for everybody). It
> defaults to using /tmp for this, but you can specify the filename.

Waiman's tests seemed to use sufficiently generic and varied workloads
(AIM7) and they showed pretty nice unconditional improvements with his
variant of this scheme, so I think testing with your simple testcase that
intentionally magnifies the scalability issue is 100% legit and may in
fact help tune the changes more accurately, because it has less inherent
noise.

And that was on a 80 core system. The speedup should be exponentially more
dramatic on silly large systems. A nicely parallel VFS isn't a bad thing
to have, especially on ridiculously loud hardware you want to run a
continent away from you.

Thanks,

Ingo
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