Re: [PATCH v2 nf-next] netfilter: conntrack: remove the central spinlock

[Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 2013-05-22 at 14:12 -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-05-22 at 13:48 -0700, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> > On Wed, 2013-05-22 at 13:38 -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
> > 
> > > u16 for cpu is hardly used at all.
> > 
> > Its used in network tree.
> > 
> > The day it has to change, don't worry, I think we'll be able to handle
> > it.
> > 
> > For the meantime, I do not want to add 4 more bytes to conntrack
> > structure, its already bloated enough.
> 
> I wrote "nice" already, no worries.
> 
> btw: netdevice.h could possibly convert xmit_lock_owner
> to u16 as well for that same 4 byte savings if the -1
> test was converted too.
> ---
>  include/linux/netdevice.h | 4 ++--
>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/include/linux/netdevice.h b/include/linux/netdevice.h
> index 60584b1..c38cd29 100644
> --- a/include/linux/netdevice.h
> +++ b/include/linux/netdevice.h
> @@ -528,7 +528,7 @@ struct netdev_queue {
>   * write mostly part
>   */
>  	spinlock_t		_xmit_lock ____cacheline_aligned_in_smp;
> -	int			xmit_lock_owner;
> +	u16			xmit_lock_owner;
>  	/*

Typical machines have less than 10 structures like this one, there is no
gain trying to save some bytes, and more gain trying to get correct
alignments ;)

While conntracking can easily consume more than 10.000.000 conntracks on
a machine.