Re: SLUB: Avoid atomic operation for slab_unlock

From: Christoph Lameter
Date: Thu Oct 18 2007 - 22:02:19 EST


On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Nick Piggin wrote:

> > Yes that is what I attempted to do with the write barrier. To my knowledge
> > there are no reads that could bleed out and I wanted to avoid a full fence
> > instruction there.
>
> Oh, OK. Bit risky ;) You might be right, but anyway I think it
> should be just as fast with the optimised bit_unlock on most
> architectures.

How expensive is the fence? An store with release semantics would be safer
and okay for IA64.

> Which reminds me, it would be interesting to test the ia64
> implementation I did. For the non-atomic unlock, I'm actually
> doing an atomic operation there so that it can use the release
> barrier rather than the mf. Maybe it's faster the other way around
> though? Will be useful to test with something that isn't a trivial
> loop, so the slub case would be a good benchmark.

Lets avoid mf (too expensive) and just use a store with release semantics.

Where can I find your patchset? I looked through lkml but did not see it.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/