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Hugh Dickins authored
SGI investigations have shown a dramatic contrast in scalability between anonymous memory and shmem objects. Processes building distinct shmem objects in parallel hit heavy contention on shmem superblock stat_lock. Across 256 cpus an intensive test runs 300 times slower than anonymous. Jack Steiner has observed that all the shmem superblock free_blocks and free_inodes accounting is redundant in the case of the internal mount used for SysV shared memory and for shared writable /dev/zero objects (the cases which most concern them): it specifically declines to limit. Based upon Brent Casavant's SHMEM_NOSBINFO patch, this instead just removes the shmem_sb_info structure from the internal kernel mount, testing where necessary for null sbinfo pointer. shmem_set_size moved within CONFIG_TMPFS, its arg named "sbinfo" as elsewhere. This brings shmem object scalability up to that of anonymous memory, in the case where distinct processes are building (faulting to allocate) distinct objects. It significantly improves parallel building of a shared shmem object (that test runs 14 times faster across 256 cpus), but other issues remain in that case: to be addressed in later patches. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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