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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