Re: [PATCH 2/2] smp_call_function: use rwlocks on queues rather than rcu

["Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 01:36:37PM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> 
> >>> So on your these large boxes, read-only cachelines are preferentially
> >>> ejected from the cache, so that one should write to per-CPU data
> >>> occasionally to keep it resident?  Or is the issue the long RCU grace
> >>> periods which allow the structure being freed to age out of all relevant
> >>> caches?  (My guess would be the second.)
> >> The issue are the RCU grace period that are generally long enough to make the
> >> cacheline fall out of all caches.
> > 
> > Would it make sense to push the freed-by-RCU memory further up the
> > hierarchy, so that such memory is not mistaken for recently freed
> > hot-in-cache memory?
> 
> That would mean passing a gfp flag like __GFP_COLD on free from RCU? Or how
> would that work at the higher levels?

I was indeed thinking in terms of the free from RCU being specially marked.

							Thanx, Paul