Re: [PATCH 1/2] scalable rw_mutex

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On 12 May 2007 20:55:28 +0200 Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org> wrote:

> Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, 11 May 2007 10:07:17 -0700 (PDT)
> > Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Fri, 11 May 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > 
> > > > yipes.  percpu_counter_sum() is expensive.
> > > 
> > > Capable of triggering NMI watchdog on 4096+ processors?
> > 
> > Well.  That would be a millisecond per cpu which sounds improbable.  And
> > we'd need to be calling it under local_irq_save() which we presently don't.
> > And nobody has reported any problems against the existing callsites.
> > 
> > But it's no speed demon, that's for sure.
> 
> There is one possible optimization for this I did some time ago. You don't really
> need to sum all over the possible map, but only all CPUs that were ever 
> online. But this only helps on systems where the possible map is bigger
> than online map in the common case. But that shouldn't be the case anymore on x86
> -- it just used to be. If it's true on some other architectures it might
> be still worth it.
> 

hm, yeah.

We could put a cpumask in percpu_counter, initialise it to
cpu_possible_map.  Then, those callsites which have hotplug notifiers can
call into new percpu_counter functions which clear and set bits in that
cpumask and which drain percpu_counter.counts[cpu] into
percpu_counter.count.

And percpu_counter_sum() gets taught to do for_each_cpu_mask(fbc->cpumask).
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