Re: [PATCH v4 0/5] vfs: Use dlock list for SB's s_inodes list

From: Tejun Heo
Date: Mon Jul 25 2016 - 13:41:41 EST


Hello, Christoph.

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 08:48:25AM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Waiman Long wrote:
>
> > - Add a new patch to make the percpu head structure cacheline aligned
> > to prevent cacheline contention from disrupting the performance
> > of nearby percpu variables.
>
> It would be better not to use the percpu allocation etc for this.
> Given the frequency of off node data access I would say that the data
> structure does not qualify as per cpu data. You have per cpu data items
> yes but this is not used as per cpu data.

I don't get it. What's the harm of using percpu memory here? Other
percpu data structures have remote access too. They're to a lower
degree but I don't see a clear demarcation line and making addtions
per-cpu seems to have significant benefits here. If there's a better
way of splitting the list and locking, sure, let's try that but short
of that I don't see anything wrong with doing this per-cpu.

Thanks.

--
tejun