Re: [patch] generic-ipi: remove kmalloc, cleanup

Peter Zijlstra
2009-02-16T09:57:50Z

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 17:46 +1030, Rusty Russell wrote:
> On Saturday 14 February 2009 10:18:05 Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Sat, 2009-02-14 at 07:46 +1030, Rusty Russell wrote:
> > > I'd be fascinated to see perf numbers once you kill the kmalloc. Because
> > > this patch will add num_possible_cpus * NR_CPUS/8 bytes to the kernel which
> > > is something we're trying to avoid unless necessary.
> >
> > You're free to make it a pointer and do node affine allocations from an
> > init section of choice and add a hotplug handler.
> >
> > But I'm not quite sure how perf is affected by size overhead on
> > ridiculous configs.
>
> No, I meant "can you actually measure the perf win of this patch?". If you
> did so, I missed it?

Over what, the always single-ipi case, or the kmalloc case?

The thing is, we're removing that kmalloc because its somewhat of a wart
on the whole thing.

> But if this patch is worthwhile, the right way to do this is make it a
> cpumask_var_t, and do the alloc_cpumask_var_node() in that init routine.

Right, and installing a hotplug handler and ... *sigh*