The recent changes from irqtrace feature has added overheads to
local_bh_disable and local_bh_enable that reduces UDP performance across
x86_64 and IA64, even though IA64 does not support the irqtrace feature.
Patch in question is

[PATCH]lockdep: irqtrace subsystem, core
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=c
ommit;h=de30a2b3

Prior to this patch, local_bh_disable was a short macro.  Now it is a
function which calls __local_bh_disable with added irq flags save and
restore.  The irq flags save and restore were also added to
local_bh_enable, probably for injecting the trace irqs code.

This overhead is on the generic code path across all architectures.  On a
IA_64 test machine (Itanium-2 1.6 GHz) running a benchmark like netperf's
UDP streaming test, the added overhead results in a drop of 3% in
throughput, as udp_sendmsg calls the local_bh_enable/disable several times.

Other workloads that have heavy usages of local_bh_enable/disable could
also be affected.  The patch ideally should not have affected IA-64
performance as it does not have IRQ tracing support.  A significant portion
of the overhead is in the added irq flags save and restore, which I think
is not needed if IRQ tracing is unused.  A suggested patch is attached
below that recovers the lost performance.  However, the "ifdef"s in the
patch are a bit ugly.
Signed-off-by: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@intel.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>