Re: [rfc] scale dcache locking

[Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>]

On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 03:23:12PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 02:55:39AM +1100, npiggin@suse.de wrote:
> > This is my sketch for improving dcache locking scalability. So far I've
> > only really been looking at core code to get an idea of how it might look,
> > so most configurable functionality is broken (and unfortunately it might
> > well be something in there which will cause a fundamental problem for me).
> 
> Umm...  Some of that makes obvious sense per se, some...  In particular,
> all of a sudden we get contention between multiple dput() on the same
> dentry, which is dirt-common for directory ones.

Yes that's true but I'm hoping lock hold times on d_lock aren't
too long, in which case the major cost should remain just the
cacheline contention.

Hmm, I wanted to avoid the atomic because it tends to be covered
by d_lock a lot of the time anyway so avoiding the extra locked op,
and also makes concurrency a bit easier to think about.

In worst case, I guess we need to reintroduce atomic refcount or
have another lock for it...