Re: [PATCH RFC v2 00/10] SLUB percpu sheaves

[Kent Overstreet]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 05:27:36PM +0100, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> - Cheaper fast paths. For allocations, instead of local double cmpxchg,
>   after Patch 5 it's preempt_disable() and no atomic operations. Same for
>   freeing, which is normally a local double cmpxchg only for a short
>   term allocations (so the same slab is still active on the same cpu when
>   freeing the object) and a more costly locked double cmpxchg otherwise.
>   The downside is the lack of NUMA locality guarantees for the allocated
>   objects.

Is that really cheaper than a local non locked double cmpxchg?

Especially if you now have to use pushf/popf...

> - kfree_rcu() batching and recycling. kfree_rcu() will put objects to a
>   separate percpu sheaf and only submit the whole sheaf to call_rcu()
>   when full. After the grace period, the sheaf can be used for
>   allocations, which is more efficient than freeing and reallocating
>   individual slab objects (even with the batching done by kfree_rcu()
>   implementation itself). In case only some cpus are allowed to handle rcu
>   callbacks, the sheaf can still be made available to other cpus on the
>   same node via the shared barn. The maple_node cache uses kfree_rcu() and
>   thus can benefit from this.

Have you looked at fs/bcachefs/rcu_pending.c?