From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ingo Molnar Subject: Re: gettimeofday scalability Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 21:18:58 +0200 Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Message-ID: <20041005191858.GA14082@elte.hu> References: <4162CD76.4070204@draigBrady.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: netdev@oss.sgi.com, Andrea Arcangeli Return-path: To: P@draigBrady.com Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4162CD76.4070204@draigBrady.com> Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org * P@draigBrady.com wrote: > In particular I was wondering about reducing the overhead of > calling do_gettimeofday. > 2.6.8.1 uses seqlock, which contains the comment that it's not as > cache friendly as brlock. that comment is way too modest! Seqlocks are very cache-friendly in the read path. There is no reason to use brlocks anymore for fixed-frequency writers like the timer seqlock. (writers can starve seqlock readers but in the timer case the writers occur only once every 1 msec.) so please benchmark 2.6, it should scale linearly in this area. Ingo