Re: [PATCH] x86: enable RCU based table free when PARAVIRT

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 3:36 PM, Kirill A. Shutemov
<kirill.shutemov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Below is test cases that allocates a lot of page tables and measuare
> fork/exit time. (I'm not entirely sure it's the best way to stress the
> codepath.)

Looks ok to me. Doing a profile (without the RCU freeing, obviously) gives me

   0.77%  a.out    [kernel.vmlinux]  [k] free_pgd_range


                                          â

so it does seem to spend time in the page directory code.

> Unpatched:      average 4.8322s, stddev 0.114s
> Patched:        average 4.8362s, stddev 0.111s

Ok, I vote for avoiding the complexity of two different behaviors, and
just making the page table freeing use RCU unconditionally.

If actively trying to trigger that code doesn't show a real measurable
difference, I don't think it matters, and the fewer different code
paths we have, the better.

              Linus