tree 4b00fa4704090876895b8a7528c6fe5e2201fc28
parent 02b67325a6d34f2ae67484a8802b6ffc9ce9931d
author Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> 1178792116 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org> 1178814412 -0700

slub: support concurrent local and remote frees and allocs on a slab

Avoid atomic overhead in slab_alloc and slab_free

SLUB needs to use the slab_lock for the per cpu slabs to synchronize with
potential kfree operations.  This patch avoids that need by moving all free
objects onto a lockless_freelist.  The regular freelist continues to exist
and will be used to free objects.  So while we consume the
lockless_freelist the regular freelist may build up objects.

If we are out of objects on the lockless_freelist then we may check the
regular freelist.  If it has objects then we move those over to the
lockless_freelist and do this again.  There is a significant savings in
terms of atomic operations that have to be performed.

We can even free directly to the lockless_freelist if we know that we are
running on the same processor.  So this speeds up short lived objects.
They may be allocated and freed without taking the slab_lock.  This is
particular good for netperf.

In order to maximize the effect of the new faster hotpath we extract the
hottest performance pieces into inlined functions.  These are then inlined
into kmem_cache_alloc and kmem_cache_free.  So hotpath allocation and
freeing no longer requires a subroutine call within SLUB.

[I am not sure that it is worth doing this because it changes the easy to
read structure of slub just to reduce atomic ops.  However, there is
someone out there with a benchmark on 4 way and 8 way processor systems
that seems to show a 5% regression vs.  Slab.  Seems that the regression is
due to increased atomic operations use vs.  SLAB in SLUB).  I wonder if
this is applicable or discernable at all in a real workload?]

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>