Re: [PATCH] gfs2: use __vmalloc GFP_NOFS for fs-related allocations.

Dave Chinner
2015-02-05T11:50:09Z

On Wed, Feb 04, 2015 at 02:13:29AM -0500, Oleg Drokin wrote:
> Hello!
>
> On Feb 3, 2015, at 5:33 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:
> >> I also wonder if vmalloc is still very slow? That was the case some
> >> time ago when I noticed a problem in directory access times in gfs2,
> >> which made us change to use kmalloc with a vmalloc fallback in the
> >> first place,
> > Another of the "myths" about vmalloc. The speed and scalability of
> > vmap/vmalloc is a long solved problem - Nick Piggin fixed the worst
> > of those problems 5-6 years ago - see the rewrite from 2008 that
> > started with commit db64fe0 ("mm: rewrite vmap layer")....
>
> This actually might be less true than one would hope. At least somewhat
> recent studies by LLNL (https://jira.hpdd.intel.com/browse/LU-4008)
> show that there's huge contention on vmlist_lock, so if you have vmalloc

vmlist_lock and the list it protected went away in 3.10.