Re: [benchmark] 1% performance overhead of paravirt_ops on native kernels

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

Hi!

> > > > The "problem" is that you could in theory run out of kmap frames, since if 
> > > > everybody does a kmap() in an interruptible context and you have lots and 
> > > > lots of threads doing different pages, you'd run out. But that has nothing 
> > > > to do with kmap_atomic(), which is basically limited to just the number of 
> > > > CPU's and a (very small) level of nesting.
> > > 
> > > This could be avoided with an anti-deadlock pool. If a task
> > > attempts a nested kmap and already holds a kmap, then give it
> > > exclusive access to this pool until it releases its last
> > > nested kmap.
> > 
> > We just sleep, waiting for somebody to release their. Again, that 
> > obviously won't work in atomic context, but it's easy enough to just have 
> > a "we need to have a few entries free" for the atomic case, and make it 
> > busy-loop if it runs out (which is not going to happen in practice 
> > anyway).
> 
> The really theoretical one (which Andrew likes complaining about) is
> when *everybody* is holding a kmap and asking for another one ;)
> But I think it isn't too hard to make a pool for that. And yes we'd

Does one pool help?

Now you can have '*everyone* is holding the kmaps and is asking for
another one'.

You could add as many pools as maximum nesting level... Is there
maximum nesting level?

-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html