Re: [PATCH] fs: fcntl_setlease defies lease_init assumptions

[Manfred Spraul <manfred@colorfullife.com>]

Christoph Lameter wrote:

>On Mon, 8 May 2006, Pekka Enberg wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>I think it sounds like it's worth it, but I'm not going to really push it.
>>>      
>>>
>>Sounds good to me. Andrew?
>>    
>>
>
>virt_to_page is not cheap on NUMA.
>
>  
>
I know. But it was a design assumption when I wrote the slab allocator.
Acutally, it's not cheap on non-NUMA either. And the PageCompound() 
check adds an additional branch.

Probably the allocator should be rewritten, without relying on 
virt_to_page().
Any proposals how kfree and kmem_cache_free could locate the cachep 
pointer? That's the performance critical part.

Right's now it's
<<<
   page = vir_to_page(objp)
   if (unlikely(PageCompound(page)))
           page = (struct page *)page_private(page);
   cachep = (struct kmem_cache *)page->lru.next;
 >>>

What about:
- switch from power of two kmalloc caches to slighly smaller caches.
- change the kmalloc(PAGE_SIZE) users to get_free_page(). 
get_free_page() is now fast, too.
- use cachep= *((struct kmem_cache **)(objp & 0xfff))

The result would be a few small restrictions: all objects must start in 
the first page of a slab (there are no exceptions on my 2.6.16 system), 
and PAGE_SIZE'd caches are very expensive. Replacing the names_cache 
with get_free_page is trivial. That leaves the pgd cache.

--
    Manfred