Hmm. Andrew wasn't cc'd on this series, and usually things like this go through the -mm tree. Maybe Andrew saw it by virtue of the linux-mm list, but maybe he didn't. So here he is cc'd directly. The series looks reasonable to me, Linus On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 12:32 PM, Andi Kleen <andi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 012f18004da33ba67 in 2.6.36 caused a significant performance regression in > fork/exit intensive workloads with a lot of sharing. The problem is that > fork/exit now contend heavily on the lock of the root anon_vma. > > This patchkit attempts to lower this a bit by batching the lock acquisions. > Right now the lock is taken for every shared vma individually. This > patchkit batches this and only reaquires the lock when actually needed. > > When multiple processes are doing this in parallel, they will now > spend much less time bouncing the lock cache line around. In addition > there should be also lower overhead in the uncontended case because > locks are relatively slow (not measured) > > This doesn't completely fix the regression on a 4S system, but cuts > it down somewhat. One particular workload suffering from this gets > about 5% faster. > > This is essentially a micro optimization that just tries to mitigate > the problem a bit. > > Better would be to switch back to more local locking like .35 had, but I > guess then we would be back with the old deadlocks? I was thinking also of > adding some deadlock avoidance as an alternative. > > -Andi > -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>