While the introduction of __copy_from_user_nocache (see commit:
0812a579c9) may have been an improvement
for sufficiently large writes, there is evidence to show that it is
deterimental for small writes. Unixbench's fstime test gives the
following results for 256 byte writes with MAX_BLOCK of 2000:
2.6.29-rc6 ( 5 samples, each in KB/sec ):
283750, 295200, 294500, 293000, 293300
2.6.29-rc6 + this patch (5 samples, each in KB/sec):
313050, 3106750, 293350, 306300, 307900
2.6.18
395700, 342000, 399100, 366050, 359850
See w_test() in src/fstime.c in unixbench version 4.1.0. Basically, the above test
consists of counting how much we can write in this manner:
alarm(10);
while (!sigalarm) {
for (f_blocks = 0; f_blocks < 2000; ++f_blocks) {
write(f, buf, 256);
}
lseek(f, 0L, 0);
}
Note, there are other components to the write syscall regression
that are not addressed here.
Signed-off-by: Salman Qazi <sqazi@google.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
30d697fa3a