On 06/28/2013 07:20 PM, Zheng Liu wrote: >> > IOW, a process needing to do a bunch of MAP_POPULATEs isn't >> > parallelizable, but one using this mechanism would be. > I look at the code, and it seems that we will handle MAP_POPULATE flag > after we release mmap_sem locking in vm_mmap_pgoff(): > > down_write(&mm->mmap_sem); > ret = do_mmap_pgoff(file, addr, len, prot, flag, pgoff, > &populate); > up_write(&mm->mmap_sem); > if (populate) > mm_populate(ret, populate); > > Am I missing something? I went and did my same test using mmap(MAP_POPULATE)/munmap() pair versus using MADV_POPULATE in 160 threads in parallel. MADV_POPULATE was about 10x faster in the threaded configuration. With MADV_POPULATE, the biggest cost is shipping the mmap_sem cacheline around so that we can write the reader count update in to it. With mmap(), there is a lot of _contention_ on that lock which is much, much more expensive than simply bouncing a cacheline around. -- 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>