On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 2:27 AM, Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Here on Ubuntu/precise v12.04.3 AMD64 I get these numbers for total loops: > > lockref: w/o patch | w/ patch > ====================== > Run #1: 2.688.094 | 2.643.004 > Run #2: 2.678.884 | 2.652.787 > Run #3: 2.686.450 | 2.650.142 > Run #4: 2.688.435 | 2.648.409 > Run #5: 2.693.770 | 2.651.514 Yes, so this is pretty much expected. If you don't have a very high core count (you don't mention your system, but that's pretty - I get ~65 million repetitions in 10 seconds on my i5-670), the cmpxchg will not help - because you don't actually see the bad "wait on spinlock" behavior in the first place. And a "cmpxchg" is slightly slower than the very optimized spinlocks, and has that annoying "read original value" first issue too. So the patch can make things a bit slower, although it will depends on the microarchitecture (and as mentioned elsewhere, there are other things that can make a bigger difference boot-to-boot - dentry allocation details etc can have "sticky" performance impact). So we may take a small hit in order to then *not* have horrible scalability at the high end. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html