mm/slab: lockless decision to grow cache
To check whether free objects exist or not precisely, we need to grab a lock. But, accuracy isn't that important because race window would be even small and if there is too much free object, cache reaper would reap it. So, this patch makes the check for free object exisistence not to hold a lock. This will reduce lock contention in heavily allocation case. Note that until now, n->shared can be freed during the processing by writing slabinfo, but, with some trick in this patch, we can access it freely within interrupt disabled period. Below is the result of concurrent allocation/free in slab allocation benchmark made by Christoph a long time ago. I make the output simpler. The number shows cycle count during alloc/free respectively so less is better. * Before Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(32): Average=248/966 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(64): Average=261/949 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(128): Average=314/1016 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(256): Average=741/1061 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(512): Average=1246/1152 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(1024): Average=2437/1259 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(2048): Average=4980/1800 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(4096): Average=9000/2078 * After Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(32): Average=344/792 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(64): Average=347/882 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(128): Average=390/959 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(256): Average=393/1067 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(512): Average=683/1229 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(1024): Average=1295/1325 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(2048): Average=2513/1664 Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(4096): Average=4742/2172 It shows that allocation performance decreases for the object size up to 128 and it may be due to extra checks in cache_alloc_refill(). But, with considering improvement of free performance, net result looks the same. Result for other size class looks very promising, roughly, 50% performance improvement. Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com> Cc: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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