Re: [GIT PULL] adaptive spinning mutexes

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Chris Mason wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:16 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>>> btw., i think spin-mutexes have a design advantage here: in a lot of code 
>>> areas it's quite difficult to use spinlocks - cannot allocate memory, 
>>> cannot call any code that can sporadically block (but does not _normally_ 
>>> block), etc.
>>>
>>> With mutexes those atomicity constraints go away - and the performance 
>>> profile should now be quite close to that of spinlocks as well.
>> Umm. Except if you wrote the code nicely and used spinlocks, you wouldn't 
>> hold the lock over all those unnecessary and complex operations.
>>
> 
> While this is true, there are examples of places we should expect
> speedups for this today.
> 
> Concurrent file creation/deletion in a single dir will often find things
> hot in cache and not have to block anywhere (mail spools).
> 
And although not as common, NNTP servers using file per article storage.

> Concurrent O_DIRECT aio writes to the same file, where i_mutex is
> dropped early on.
> 
> pipes should see a huge improvement.
> 
I'd like to see that. Didn't realize how slow pipes really are.

> I'll kick off some runs of my three benchmarks on ext3 for comparison.
> If there are things less synthetic people would like to see, please let
> me know.
> 
> -chris
> 
> 
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-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot