while lock-profiling the -rt kernel i noticed weird contention during
mmap-intense workloads, and the tracer showed the following gem, in one
of our MM hotpaths:
threaded-2771 1.... 65us : sys_munmap (sysenter_do_call)
threaded-2771 1.... 66us : profile_munmap (sys_munmap)
threaded-2771 1.... 66us : blocking_notifier_call_chain (profile_munmap)
threaded-2771 1.... 66us : rt_down_read (blocking_notifier_call_chain)
ouch! a global rw-semaphore taken in one of the most performance-
sensitive codepaths of the kernel. And i dont even have oprofile
enabled! All distro kernels have CONFIG_PROFILING enabled, so this
scalability problem affects the majority of Linux users.
The fix is to enhance blocking_notifier_call_chain() to only take the
lock if there appears to be work on the call-chain.
With this patch applied i get nicely saturated system, and much higher
munmap performance, on SMP systems.
And as a bonus this also fixes a similar scalability bottleneck in the
thread-exit codepath: profile_task_exit() ...
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1b5180b651