Some oprofile results obtained while using tbench on a 2x2 cpu machine were
very surprising.
For example, loopback_xmit() function was using high number of cpu cycles
to perform the statistic updates, supposed to be real cheap since they use
percpu data
pcpu_lstats = netdev_priv(dev);
lb_stats = per_cpu_ptr(pcpu_lstats, smp_processor_id());
lb_stats->packets++; /* HERE : serious contention */
lb_stats->bytes += skb->len;
struct pcpu_lstats is a small structure containing two longs. It appears
that on my 32bits platform, alloc_percpu(8) allocates a single cache line,
instead of giving to each cpu a separate cache line.
Using the following patch gave me impressive boost in various benchmarks
( 6 % in tbench)
(all percpu_counters hit this bug too)
Long term fix (ie >= 2.6.26) would be to let each CPU allocate their own
block of memory, so that we dont need to roudup sizes to L1_CACHE_BYTES, or
merging the SGI stuff of course...
Note : SLUB vs SLAB is important here to *show* the improvement, since they
dont have the same minimum allocation sizes (8 bytes vs 32 bytes). This
could very well explain regressions some guys reported when they switched
to SLUB.
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <dada1@cosmosbay.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Instead of allocating a fix sized array of NR_CPUS pointers for percpu_data,
we can use nr_cpu_ids, which is generally < NR_CPUS.
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <dada1@cosmosbay.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
kmalloc_node() and kmem_cache_alloc_node() were not available in a zeroing
variant in the past. But with __GFP_ZERO it is possible now to do zeroing
while allocating.
Use __GFP_ZERO to remove the explicit clearing of memory via memset whereever
we can.
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>
The patch (as824b) makes percpu_free() ignore NULL arguments, as one would
expect for a deallocation routine. (Note that free_percpu is #defined as
percpu_free in include/linux/percpu.h.) A few callers are updated to remove
now-unneeded tests for NULL. A few other callers already seem to assume
that passing a NULL pointer to percpu_free() is okay!
The patch also removes an unnecessary NULL check in percpu_depopulate().
Signed-off-by: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The allocpercpu functions __alloc_percpu and __free_percpu() are heavily
using the slab allocator. However, they are conceptually slab. This also
simplifies SLOB (at this point slob may be broken in mm. This should fix
it).
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
