Re: Strange load spikes on 2.4.19 kernel

Andi Kleen
2002-10-13T07:18:43Z

"David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com> writes:
>
> Allocating blocks and inodes, yes that is currently single
> threaded on SMP. But there is no fundamental reason for that,
> we just haven't gotten around to threading that bit yet.

It depends on your file system. XFS and JFS do block and inode allocation
fully SMP multithreaded. reiserfs/ext2/ext3 do not.

Still in 2.4 the VFS takes the big kernel lock unnecessarily for
a few VFS operations (no matter if the underlying FS needs it or not).
That's fixed in 2.5.

-Andi