Re: REGRESSION: Performance regressions from switching anon_vma->lock to mutex

Ingo Molnar
2011-06-15T20:17:55Z

* Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 12:11 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> >
> > And it results in real problems. For example, if you use "perf record"
> > to see what the hell is up, the use of kernel threads for RCU
> > callbacks means that the RCU cost is never even seen. I don't know how
> > Tim did his profiling to figure out the costs, and I don't know how he
> > decided that the spinlock to semaphore conversion was the culprit, but
> > it is entirely possible that Tim didn't actually bisect the problem,
> > but instead used "perf record" on the exim task, saw that the
> > semaphore costs had gone up, and decided that it must be the
> > conversion.
> >
>
> Yes, I was using perf to do the profiling. I thought that the mutex
> conversion was the most likely culprit based on the change in
> profile.

have you used callgraph profiling (perf record -g) or flat profiling?
Flat profiling can be misleading when there's proxy work done.

Thanks,

Ingo