Re: smp race fix between invalidate_inode_pages* and do_no_page

[Andrew Morton]

Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> (I guess reclaim might be one, but quite rare -- any other significant
>  lock_page users that we might hit?)

The only time 2.6 holds lock_page() for a significant duration is when
bringing the page uptodate with readpage or memset.

The scalability risk here is 100 CPUs all faulting in the same file in the
same pattern.  Like the workload which caused the page_table_lock splitup
(that was with anon pages).  All the CPUs could pretty easily get into sync
and start arguing over every single page's lock.
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