Re: [RFC][PATCH] fs: optimize inotify/fsnotify code for unwatched files

From: Paul E. McKenney
Date: Wed Jun 24 2015 - 13:30:02 EST


On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 09:50:50AM -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On 06/22/2015 05:26 PM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > OK, here is an experimental patch that provides a fast-readers variant
> > of RCU, forward-ported from v3.3. Because we didn't have call_srcu()
> > and srcu_barrier() back then, it is not a drop-in replacement for SRCU,
> > so you need to adapt the code to the API, which means putting an "fr"
> > in front of the "srcu" in the API members.
> >
> > Understood on the overhead of the memory-barrier instruction showing
> > up consistently. My point was instead that getting rid of this
> > memory-barrier instruction does not come for free, as it greatly
> > increases the latency of synchronize_frsrcu(). In a real workload,
> > it is entirely possible that the savings from eliminating the memory
> > barrier are overwhelmed by the increased grace-period latency.
> >
> > Anyway, the patch is below. Very lightly tested.
>
> This does give a very similar performance boost as the other
> optimization I posted. I measured this patch to boost the writes/second
> by 11.0% while my previous optimization did 10.8%.
>
> I don't think this workload will see any of the overhead of the
> synchronize_frsrcu(), though, but this helps confirm the source of the
> overhead.

Thank you for testing it! I agree that your patch is much simpler than
adding another flavor of RCU, so I prefer your patch, but the confirmation
is nevertheless valuable.

Thanx, Paul

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