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Christoph Lameter authored
Avoid atomic overhead in slab_alloc and slab_free SLUB needs to use the slab_lock for the per cpu slabs to synchronize with potential kfree operations. This patch avoids that need by moving all free objects onto a lockless_freelist. The regular freelist continues to exist and will be used to free objects. So while we consume the lockless_freelist the regular freelist may build up objects. If we are out of objects on the lockless_freelist then we may check the regular freelist. If it has objects then we move those over to the lockless_freelist and do this again. There is a significant savings in terms of atomic operations that have to be performed. We can even free directly to the lockless_freelist if we know that we are running on the same processor. So this speeds up short lived objects. They may be allocated and freed without taking the slab_lock. This is particular good for netperf. In order to maximize the effect of the new faster hotpath we extract the hottest performance pieces into inlined functions. These are then inlined into kmem_cache_alloc and kmem_cache_free. So hotpath allocation and freeing no longer requires a subroutine call within SLUB. [I am not sure that it is worth doing this because it changes the easy to read structure of slub just to reduce atomic ops. However, there is someone out there with a benchmark on 4 way and 8 way processor systems that seems to show a 5% regression vs. Slab. Seems that the regression is due to increased atomic operations use vs. SLAB in SLUB). I wonder if this is applicable or discernable at all in a real workload?] Signed-off-by:
Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
894b8788