Richard Yao reported a month ago that his system have a trouble with vmap_area_lock contention during performance analysis by /proc/meminfo. Andrew asked why his analysis checks /proc/meminfo stressfully, but he didn't answer it. https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/4/10/416 Although I'm not sure that this is right usage or not, there is a solution reducing vmap_area_lock contention with no side-effect. That is just to use rcu list iterator in get_vmalloc_info(). rcu can be used in this function because all RCU protocol is already respected by writers, since Nick Piggin commit db64fe02258f1507e13fe5 ("mm: rewrite vmap layer") back in linux-2.6.28 Specifically : insertions use list_add_rcu(), deletions use list_del_rcu() and kfree_rcu(). Note the rb tree is not used from rcu reader (it would not be safe), only the vmap_area_list has full RCU protection. Note that __purge_vmap_area_lazy() already uses this rcu protection. rcu_read_lock(); list_for_each_entry_rcu(va, &vmap_area_list, list) { if (va->flags & VM_LAZY_FREE) { if (va->va_start < *start) *start = va->va_start; if (va->va_end > *end) *end = va->va_end; nr += (va->va_end - va->va_start) >> PAGE_SHIFT; list_add_tail(&va->purge_list, &valist); va->flags |= VM_LAZY_FREEING; va->flags &= ~VM_LAZY_FREE; } } rcu_read_unlock(); v2: add more commit description from Eric [edumazet@xxxxxxxxxx: add more commit description] Reported-by: Richard Yao <ryao@xxxxxxxxxx> Acked-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@xxxxxxx> diff --git a/mm/vmalloc.c b/mm/vmalloc.c index f64632b..fdbb116 100644 --- a/mm/vmalloc.c +++ b/mm/vmalloc.c @@ -2690,14 +2690,14 @@ void get_vmalloc_info(struct vmalloc_info *vmi) prev_end = VMALLOC_START; - spin_lock(&vmap_area_lock); + rcu_read_lock(); if (list_empty(&vmap_area_list)) { vmi->largest_chunk = VMALLOC_TOTAL; goto out; } - list_for_each_entry(va, &vmap_area_list, list) { + list_for_each_entry_rcu(va, &vmap_area_list, list) { unsigned long addr = va->va_start; /* @@ -2724,7 +2724,7 @@ void get_vmalloc_info(struct vmalloc_info *vmi) vmi->largest_chunk = VMALLOC_END - prev_end; out: - spin_unlock(&vmap_area_lock); + rcu_read_unlock(); } #endif -- 1.7.9.5 -- 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>