Re: [PATCH] percpu_counter: Fix __percpu_counter_sum()

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, 8 Dec 2008 17:12:41 -0500
Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> Actually, if all popular architectures had a hardware-implemented
> atomic_t, I wonder how much ext4 really needs the percpu counter,
> especially given ext4's multiblock allocator; with ext3, given that
> each block allocation required taking a per-filesystem spin lock,
> optimizing away that spinlock was far more important for improving
> ext3's scalability.  But with the multiblock allocator, it may that
> we're going through a lot more effort than what is truly necessary.

I expect that the performance numbers for the percpu counters in the
superblock are buried away in the historical git changelogs somewhere. 
I don't recall how much difference it made.

An atomic_inc() of an fs-wide counter will have similar cost to
spin_lock() of an fs-wide lock.

If the multiblock allocator can avoid doing one atomic_inc() for each
block and can instead do atomic_add(large_value, &counter) then yes,
I'm sure that an fs-wide atomic_long_t would be OK.

Of course, similar changes should be made in trucate, etc.