Re: [patch 2/6] mmu_notifier: Callbacks to invalidate address ranges

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@qumranet.com>]

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 01:03:16PM -0800, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> That means we need both the anon_vma locks and the i_mmap_lock to become 
> semaphores. I think semaphores are better than mutexes. Rik and Lee saw 
> some performance improvements because list can be traversed in parallel 
> when the anon_vma lock is switched to be a rw lock.

The improvement was with a rw spinlock IIRC, so I don't see how it's
related to this.

Perhaps the rwlock spinlock can be changed to a rw semaphore without
measurable overscheduling in the fast path. However theoretically
speaking the rw_lock spinlock is more efficient than a rw semaphore in
case of a little contention during the page fault fast path because
the critical section is just a list_add so it'd be overkill to
schedule while waiting. That's why currently it's a spinlock (or rw
spinlock).

> Sounds like we get to a conceptually clean version here?

I don't have a strong opinion if it should become a semaphore
unconditionally or only with a CONFIG_XPMEM=y. But keep in mind
preempt-rt runs quite a bit slower, or we could rip spinlocks out of
the kernel in the first place ;)