Re: [PATCH] Introduce a method to catch mmap_region (was: Recent kernel "mount" slow)

Mikulas Patocka
2012-11-28T22:11:40Z

On Wed, 28 Nov 2012, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 12:32 PM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> >
> > Here is a *COMPLETELY* untested patch. Caveat emptor. It will probably
> > do unspeakable things to your family and pets.
>
> Btw, *if* this approach works, I suspect we could just switch the
> bd_block_size_semaphore semaphore to be a regular rw-sem.
>
> Why? Because now it's no longer ever gotten in the cached IO paths, we
> only get it when we're doing much more expensive things (ie actual IO,
> and buffer head allocations etc etc). As long as we just work with the
> page cache, we never get to the whole lock at all.
>
> Which means that the whole percpu-optimized thing is likely no longer
> all that relevant.

Using normal semaphore degrades direct-IO performance on raw devices, I
measured that (45.1s with normal rw-semaphore vs. 42.8s with
percpu-rw-semaphore). It could be measured on ramdisk or high-performance
SSDs.

Mikulas