Re: [rfc] lockless pagecache

[Sonny Rao <sonny@burdell.org>]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 08:31:40AM -0700, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
> >> > On Mon, 27 Jun 2005, Chen, Kenneth W wrote:
> >> > > I don't recall seeing tree_lock to be a problem for DSS workload either.
> >> > 
> >> > I have seen the tree_lock being a problem a number of times with large 
> >> > scale NUMA type workloads.
> >> 
> >> I totally agree!  My earlier posts are strictly referring to industry
> >> standard db workloads (OLTP, DSS).  I'm not saying it's not a problem
> >> for everyone :-)  Obviously you just outlined a few ....
> > 
> > I'm a bit late to the party here (was gone on vacation), but I do have
> > profiles from DSS workloads using page-cache rather than O_DIRECT and
> > I do see spin_lock_irq() in the profiles which I'm pretty certain are
> > locks spinning for access to the radix_tree.  I'll talk about it a bit
> > more up in Ottawa but here's the top 5 on my profile (sorry don't have
> > the number of ticks at the momement):
> > 
> > 1. dedicated_idle (waiting for I/O)
> > 2. __copy_tofrom_user
> > 3. radix_tree_delete
> > 4. _spin_lock_irq
> > 5. __find_get_block
> > 
> > So, yes, if the page-cache is used in a DSS workload then one will see
> > the tree-lock.  BTW, this was on a PPC64 machine w/ a fairly small
> > NUMA factor.
> 
> The easiest way to confirm the spin-lock thing is to recompile with 
> CONFIG_SPINLINE, and take a new profile, then diff the two ...

Yep...

Unfortunately, this is broken in PPC64 since 2.6.9-rc2 or something
like that, I never had a chance to track down what the issue was
exactly.  IIRC, there was a lot of churn in the spinlocking code
around that time.

Sonny
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