Christoph Lameter demonstrated very poor scalability on the SGI 512-way, with
a many-threaded application which concurrently initializes different parts of
a large anonymous area.
This patch corrects that, by using a separate spinlock per page table page, to
guard the page table entries in that page, instead of using the mm's single
page_table_lock. (But even then, page_table_lock is still used to guard page
table allocation, and anon_vma allocation.)
In this implementation, the spinlock is tucked inside the struct page of the
page table page: with a BUILD_BUG_ON in case it overflows - which it would in
the case of 32-bit PA-RISC with spinlock debugging enabled.
Splitting the lock is not quite for free: another cacheline access. Ideally,
I suppose we would use split ptlock only for multi-threaded processes on
multi-cpu machines; but deciding that dynamically would have its own costs.
So for now enable it by config, at some number of cpus - since the Kconfig
language doesn't support inequalities, let preprocessor compare that with
NR_CPUS. But I don't think it's worth being user-configurable: for good
testing of both split and unsplit configs, split now at 4 cpus, and perhaps
change that to 8 later.
There is a benefit even for singly threaded processes: kswapd can be attacking
one part of the mm while another part is busy faulting.
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Hugh Dickins
4c21e2f244