tree cc521e8e13db01813e0e1b4b67ecc20a18551212
parent 6af29ccc223b0feb6fc6112281c3fa3cdb1afddf
author Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com> 1314025046 +0000
committer David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net> 1314240073 -0700

Scm: Remove unnecessary pid & credential references in Unix socket's send and receive path

Patch series 109f6e39..7361c36c back in 2.6.36 added functionality to
allow credentials to work across pid namespaces for packets sent via
UNIX sockets.  However, the atomic reference counts on pid and
credentials caused plenty of cache bouncing when there are numerous
threads of the same pid sharing a UNIX socket.  This patch mitigates the
problem by eliminating extraneous reference counts on pid and
credentials on both send and receive path of UNIX sockets. I found a 2x
improvement in hackbench's threaded case.

On the receive path in unix_dgram_recvmsg, currently there is an
increment of reference count on pid and credentials in scm_set_cred.
Then there are two decrement of the reference counts.  Once in scm_recv
and once when skb_free_datagram call skb->destructor function
unix_destruct_scm.  One pair of increment and decrement of ref count on
pid and credentials can be eliminated from the receive path.  Until we
destroy the skb, we already set a reference when we created the skb on
the send side.

On the send path, there are two increments of ref count on pid and
credentials, once in scm_send and once in unix_scm_to_skb.  Then there
is a decrement of the reference counts in scm_destroy's call to
scm_destroy_cred at the end of unix_dgram_sendmsg functions.   One pair
of increment and decrement of the reference counts can be removed so we
only need to increment the ref counts once.

By incorporating these changes, for hackbench running on a 4 socket
NHM-EX machine with 40 cores, the execution of hackbench on
50 groups of 20 threads sped up by factor of 2.

Hackbench command used for testing:
./hackbench 50 thread 2000

Signed-off-by: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>