On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 05:42:11PM +0000, Al Viro wrote: > [Apologies for delay; I'd spent the last day hunting down something that > turned out to be a VM leak completely unrelated to this stuff - it's > present in mainline, for starters. Unreliable reproducers make for fun > bisects ;-/ Anyway, by now I'm absolutely sure that this is a VM bug and > not something I had somehow managed to break, so...] BTW, something odd happened to mm/memory.c - either a mangled patch or a lost followup. Take a look at the last commit in there: commit ea1e7ed33708c7a760419ff9ded0a6cb90586a50 Author: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu Nov 14 14:31:53 2013 -0800 mm: create a separate slab for page->ptl allocation If DEBUG_SPINLOCK and DEBUG_LOCK_ALLOC are enabled spinlock_t on x86_64 is 72 bytes. For page->ptl they will be allocated from kmalloc-96 slab, so we loose 24 on each. An average system can easily allocate few tens thousands of page->ptl and overhead is significant. Let's create a separate slab for page->ptl allocation to solve this. Signed-off-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fair enough, and yes, it does create that separate slab. The problem is, it's still using kmalloc/kfree for those beasts - page_ptl_cachep isn't used at all... -- 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