On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 10:55:17AM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote: > We had to insert a preempt enable/disable in the fastpath a while ago. This > was mainly due to a lot of state that is kept to be allocating from the per > cpu freelist. In particular the page field is not covered by > this_cpu_cmpxchg used in the fastpath to do the necessary atomic state > change for fast path allocation and freeing. > > This patch removes the need for the page field to describe the state of the > per cpu list. The freelist pointer can be used to determine the page struct > address if necessary. > > However, currently this does not work for the termination value of a list > which is NULL and the same for all slab pages. If we use a valid pointer > into the page as well as set the last bit then all freelist pointers can > always be used to determine the address of the page struct and we will not > need the page field anymore in the per cpu are for a slab. Testing for the > end of the list is a test if the first bit is set. > > So the first patch changes the termination pointer for freelists to do just > that. The second removes the page field and then third can then remove the > preempt enable/disable. > > There are currently a number of caveats because we are adding calls to > page_address() and virt_to_head_page() in a number of code paths. These > can hopefully be removed one way or the other. > > Removing the ->page field reduces the cache footprint of the fastpath so hopefully overall > allocator effectiveness will increase further. Also RT uses full preemption which means > that currently pretty expensive code has to be inserted into the fastpath. This approach > allows the removal of that code and a corresponding performance increase. > Hello, Christoph. Preemption disable during very short code would cause large problem for RT? And, if page_address() and virt_to_head_page() remain as current patchset implementation, this would work worse than before. I looked at the patchset quickly and found another idea to remove preemption disable. How about just retrieving s->cpu_slab->tid first, before accessing s->cpu_slab, in slab_alloc() and slab_free()? Retrieved tid may ensure that we aren't migrated to other CPUs so that we can remove code for preemption disable. Following is the patch implementing above idea. Thanks. ------------->8------------------------ diff --git a/mm/slub.c b/mm/slub.c index ae7b9f1..af622d8 100644 --- a/mm/slub.c +++ b/mm/slub.c @@ -2386,28 +2386,21 @@ static __always_inline void *slab_alloc_node(struct kmem_cache *s, s = memcg_kmem_get_cache(s, gfpflags); redo: /* + * The transaction ids are globally unique per cpu and per operation on + * a per cpu queue. Thus they can be guarantee that the cmpxchg_double + * occurs on the right processor and that there was no operation on the + * linked list in between. + */ + tid = this_cpu_read(s->cpu_slab->tid); + + /* * Must read kmem_cache cpu data via this cpu ptr. Preemption is * enabled. We may switch back and forth between cpus while * reading from one cpu area. That does not matter as long * as we end up on the original cpu again when doing the cmpxchg. - * - * Preemption is disabled for the retrieval of the tid because that - * must occur from the current processor. We cannot allow rescheduling - * on a different processor between the determination of the pointer - * and the retrieval of the tid. */ - preempt_disable(); c = this_cpu_ptr(s->cpu_slab); - /* - * The transaction ids are globally unique per cpu and per operation on - * a per cpu queue. Thus they can be guarantee that the cmpxchg_double - * occurs on the right processor and that there was no operation on the - * linked list in between. - */ - tid = c->tid; - preempt_enable(); - object = c->freelist; page = c->page; if (unlikely(!object || !node_match(page, node))) { @@ -2646,18 +2639,16 @@ static __always_inline void slab_free(struct kmem_cache *s, slab_free_hook(s, x); redo: + tid = this_cpu_read(s->cpu_slab->tid); + /* * Determine the currently cpus per cpu slab. * The cpu may change afterward. However that does not matter since * data is retrieved via this pointer. If we are on the same cpu * during the cmpxchg then the free will succedd. */ - preempt_disable(); c = this_cpu_ptr(s->cpu_slab); - tid = c->tid; - preempt_enable(); - if (likely(page == c->page)) { set_freepointer(s, object, c->freelist); -- 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>