Re: [RFC][PATCH] fs: optimize inotify/fsnotify code for unwatched files

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

On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 09:50:50AM -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On 06/22/2015 05:26 PM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > OK, here is an experimental patch that provides a fast-readers variant
> > of RCU, forward-ported from v3.3.  Because we didn't have call_srcu()
> > and srcu_barrier() back then, it is not a drop-in replacement for SRCU,
> > so you need to adapt the code to the API, which means putting an "fr"
> > in front of the "srcu" in the API members.
> > 
> > Understood on the overhead of the memory-barrier instruction showing
> > up consistently.  My point was instead that getting rid of this
> > memory-barrier instruction does not come for free, as it greatly
> > increases the latency of synchronize_frsrcu().  In a real workload,
> > it is entirely possible that the savings from eliminating the memory
> > barrier are overwhelmed by the increased grace-period latency.
> > 
> > Anyway, the patch is below.  Very lightly tested.
> 
> This does give a very similar performance boost as the other
> optimization I posted.  I measured this patch to boost the writes/second
> by 11.0% while my previous optimization did 10.8%.
> 
> I don't think this workload will see any of the overhead of the
> synchronize_frsrcu(), though, but this helps confirm the source of the
> overhead.

Thank you for testing it!  I agree that your patch is much simpler than
adding another flavor of RCU, so I prefer your patch, but the confirmation
is nevertheless valuable.

							Thanx, Paul