On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 4:26 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > So as a quick concept hack I wrote the patch attached below. > (It's not signed off, see the patch description text for the > reason.) Well, it confirms that anon_vma locking is a big problem, but as outlined in my other email it's completely incorrect from an actual behavior standpoint. Btw, I think the anon_vma lock could be made a spinlock instead of a mutex or rwsem, but that would probably take more work. We *shouldn't* be doing anything that needs IO inside the anon_vma lock, though, so it *should* be doable. But there are probably quite a bit of allocations inside the lock, and I know it covers huge areas, so a spinlock might not only be hard to convert to, it quite likely has latency issues too. Oh, btw, MUTEX_SPIN_ON_OWNER may well improve performance too, but it gets disabled by DEBUG_MUTEXES. So some of the performance impact of the vma locking may be *very* kernel-config dependent. Linus -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>