Re: [NAK] Re: [PATCH] fs: Optimized fget to improve performance

[Al Viro]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 09:43:31AM +0800, Shaokun Zhang wrote:

> How about this? We try to replace atomic_cmpxchg with atomic_add to improve
> performance. The atomic_add does not check the current f_count value.
> Therefore, the number of online CPUs is reserved to prevent multi-core
> competition.

No.  Really, really - no.  Not unless you can guarantee that process on another
CPU won't lose its timeslice, ending up with more than one increment happening on
the same CPU - done by different processes scheduled there, one after another.

If you have some change of atomic_long_add_unless(), do it there.  And get it
past the arm64 folks.  get_file_rcu() is nothing special in that respect *AND*
it has to cope with any architecture out there.

BTW, keep in mind that there's such thing as a KVM - race windows are much
wider there, since a thread representing a guest CPU might lose its timeslice
whenever the host feels like that.  At which point you get a single instruction
on a guest CPU taking longer than many thousands of instructions on another
CPU of the same guest.

AFAIK, arm64 does support KVM with SMP guests.