The performance improvement is very significant.
We are getting killed by the cacheline bouncing of the files_struct
lock here. Writes on ramdisk (ext2) seems to vary just too
much to get any meaningful number.
Also, With Tridge's thread_perf test on a 4(8)-way (HT) P4 xeon system :
2.6.12-rc5-vanilla :
Running test 'readwrite' with 8 tasks
Threads 0.34 +/- 0.01 seconds
Processes 0.16 +/- 0.00 seconds
2.6.12-rc5-fd :
Running test 'readwrite' with 8 tasks
Threads 0.17 +/- 0.02 seconds
Processes 0.17 +/- 0.02 seconds
I repeated the measurements on ramfs (as opposed to ext2 on ramdisk in
the earlier measurement) and I got more consistent results from tiobench :
2.6.12-rc5-vanilla
--------------------
Running test 'readwrite' with 4 tasks
Threads 0.20 +/- 0.02 seconds
Processes 0.16 +/- 0.01 seconds
2.6.12-rc5-fd
--------------------
Running test 'readwrite' with 4 tasks
Threads 0.18 +/- 0.04 seconds
Processes 0.16 +/- 0.01 seconds
The benefits are huge (upto ~60%) in some cases on x86 primarily
due to the atomic operations during acquisition of ->file_lock
and cache line bouncing in fast path. ppc64 benefits are modest
due to LL/SC based locking, but still statistically significant.
This patch:
RCU head initilizer no longer needs the head varible name since we don't use
list.h lists anymore.