tree 8324a3fa378d28f6a63c8b5f5a86311e4eea3562
parent 27f5e0f694fd0600274a76854636c0749e3bb1f6
author Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com> 1281399545 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1281411898 -0700

tmpfs: make tmpfs scalable with percpu_counter for used blocks

The current implementation of tmpfs is not scalable.  We found that
stat_lock is contended by multiple threads when we need to get a new page,
leading to useless spinning inside this spin lock.

This patch makes use of the percpu_counter library to maintain local count
of used blocks to speed up getting and returning of pages.  So the
acquisition of stat_lock is unnecessary for getting and returning blocks,
improving the performance of tmpfs on system with large number of cpus.
On a 4 socket 32 core NHM-EX system, we saw improvement of 270%.

The implementation below has a slight chance of race between threads
causing a slight overshoot of the maximum configured blocks.  However, any
overshoot is small, and is bounded by the number of cpus.  This happens
when the number of used blocks is slightly below the maximum configured
blocks when a thread checks the used block count, and another thread
allocates the last block before the current thread does.  This should not
be a problem for tmpfs, as the overshoot is most likely to be a few blocks
and bounded.  If a strict limit is really desired, then configured the max
blocks to be the limit less the number of cpus in system.

Signed-off-by: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>