Re: [patch] notifiers: fix blocking_notifier_call_chain() scalability

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Tue Jan 23 2007 - 10:12:10 EST


Peter Zijlstra wrote:
On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 10:45 +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:

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@xxxxxxx>


Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx>

---
kernel/sys.c | 15 +++++++++++----
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

Index: linux/kernel/sys.c
===================================================================
--- linux.orig/kernel/sys.c
+++ linux/kernel/sys.c
@@ -325,11 +325,18 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(blocking_notifier_chai
int blocking_notifier_call_chain(struct blocking_notifier_head *nh,
unsigned long val, void *v)
{
- int ret;
+ int ret = NOTIFY_DONE;

- down_read(&nh->rwsem);
- ret = notifier_call_chain(&nh->head, val, v);
- up_read(&nh->rwsem);
+ /*
+ * We check the head outside the lock, but if this access is
+ * racy then it does not matter what the result of the test
+ * is, we re-check the list after having taken the lock anyway:
+ */

Great idea!

+ if (rcu_dereference(nh->head)) {

Except rcu_dereference() is not needed.

+ down_read(&nh->rwsem);
+ ret = notifier_call_chain(&nh->head, val, v);
+ up_read(&nh->rwsem);
+ }
return ret;
}

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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