kernel_lock() profiling results

Manfred Spraul (manfreds@colorfullife.com)
Sun, 23 May 1999 16:30:52 +0200

I've written a small patch that measures the duration how long the
kernel-lock is owned.
The main results:
- compiling:
* nearly 60% of all callers release the lock after less than 1024 CPU
cycles.
* a few callers own the lock very long, e.g. sys_bdflush for more than
10 milliseconds (>0.01 seconds).
- serving web pages with apache:
* only 17% need less than 1024 CPU cycles
* 55% need less than 2048 CPU cycles.

The patch and a list of all functions which owned the lock for more then
1.5 milliseconds is at
http://www.colorfullife.com/manfreds/kernel_lock/

OTHO, 2048 cpu cycles is about as long as __cpu_user() needs for 700
bytes if source,dest are currently not in the cache (I've tested it
with a 16 MB move from user mode). The memmove will be even
slower with faster CPU's (i.e. with a higher cpu clock/bus clock
multiplier)

My question:
Shouldn't we change file_read_actor() [mm/filemap.c, the function which
copies data from the page cache to user mode]:
we could release the kernel lock if we copy more than 1024 bytes.
(we currently do that only if the user mode memory is not paged in.)

Manfred

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