mm/slab: refill cpu cache through a new slab without holding a node lock

Until now, cache growing makes a free slab on node's slab list and then
we can allocate free objects from it.  This necessarily requires to hold
a node lock which is very contended.  If we refill cpu cache before
attaching it to node's slab list, we can avoid holding a node lock as
much as possible because this newly allocated slab is only visible to
the current task.  This will reduce lock contention.

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=355/750
  Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(64): Average=452/812
  Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(128): Average=559/1070
  Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(256): Average=1176/980
  Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(512): Average=1939/1189
  Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(1024): Average=3521/1278
  Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(2048): Average=7152/1838
  Kmalloc N*alloc N*free(4096): Average=13438/2013

  * After
  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

It shows that contention is reduced for all the object sizes and
performance increases by 30 ~ 40%.

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>
1 file changed