linux/arch/x86
Nick Piggin 8174c430e4 x86: lockless get_user_pages_fast()
Implement get_user_pages_fast without locking in the fastpath on x86.

Do an optimistic lockless pagetable walk, without taking mmap_sem or any
page table locks or even mmap_sem.  Page table existence is guaranteed by
turning interrupts off (combined with the fact that we're always looking
up the current mm, means we can do the lockless page table walk within the
constraints of the TLB shootdown design).  Basically we can do this
lockless pagetable walk in a similar manner to the way the CPU's pagetable
walker does not have to take any locks to find present ptes.

This patch (combined with the subsequent ones to convert direct IO to use
it) was found to give about 10% performance improvement on a 2 socket 8
core Intel Xeon system running an OLTP workload on DB2 v9.5

 "To test the effects of the patch, an OLTP workload was run on an IBM
  x3850 M2 server with 2 processors (quad-core Intel Xeon processors at
  2.93 GHz) using IBM DB2 v9.5 running Linux 2.6.24rc7 kernel.  Comparing
  runs with and without the patch resulted in an overall performance
  benefit of ~9.8%.  Correspondingly, oprofiles showed that samples from
  __up_read and __down_read routines that is seen during thread contention
  for system resources was reduced from 2.8% down to .05%.  Monitoring the
  /proc/vmstat output from the patched run showed that the counter for
  fast_gup contained a very high number while the fast_gup_slow value was
  zero."

(fast_gup is the old name for get_user_pages_fast, fast_gup_slow is a
counter we had for the number of times the slowpath was invoked).

The main reason for the improvement is that DB2 has multiple threads each
issuing direct-IO.  Direct-IO uses get_user_pages, and thus the threads
contend the mmap_sem cacheline, and can also contend on page table locks.

I would anticipate larger performance gains on larger systems, however I
think DB2 uses an adaptive mix of threads and processes, so it could be
that thread contention remains pretty constant as machine size increases.
In which case, we stuck with "only" a 10% gain.

The downside of using get_user_pages_fast is that if there is not a pte
with the correct permissions for the access, we end up falling back to
get_user_pages and so the get_user_pages_fast is a bit of extra work.
However this should not be the common case in most performance critical
code.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: build fix]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: Kconfig fix]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: Makefile fix/cleanup]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: warning fix]
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Dave Kleikamp <shaggy@austin.ibm.com>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: Dave Kleikamp <shaggy@austin.ibm.com>
Cc: Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Zach Brown <zach.brown@oracle.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-07-26 12:00:06 -07:00
..
boot inflate: refactor inflate malloc code 2008-07-25 10:53:28 -07:00
configs Subject: devmem, x86: fix rename of CONFIG_NONPROMISC_DEVMEM 2008-07-20 08:35:55 +02:00
crypto [CRYPTO] aes-x86-32: Remove unused return code 2008-04-21 10:19:21 +08:00
ia32 x86_64: fix ia32 AMD syscall audit fast-path 2008-07-25 20:02:41 -07:00
kernel kexec jump: save/restore device state 2008-07-26 12:00:04 -07:00
kvm KVM: MMU: Fix potential race setting upper shadow ptes on nonpae hosts 2008-07-20 12:42:40 +03:00
lguest x86: APIC: remove apic_write_around(); use alternatives 2008-07-18 12:51:21 +02:00
lib Merge branch 'generic-ipi' into generic-ipi-for-linus 2008-07-15 21:55:59 +02:00
mach-default x86: add ->pre_time_init to x86_quirks 2008-07-20 09:25:52 +02:00
mach-es7000 x86: move the last Dprintk instance to pr_debug() 2008-07-21 21:58:34 +02:00
mach-generic x86: make generic arch support NUMAQ, fix 2008-07-08 10:35:45 +02:00
mach-rdc321x x86, rdc321x: remove watchdog file 2008-04-17 17:40:50 +02:00
mach-voyager Merge branch 'generic-ipi' into generic-ipi-for-linus 2008-07-15 21:55:59 +02:00
math-emu x86: coding style fixes to arch/x86/math-emu/reg_constant 2008-06-18 15:00:13 +02:00
mm x86: lockless get_user_pages_fast() 2008-07-26 12:00:06 -07:00
oprofile x86/oprofile/nmi_int: add Nehalem to list of ppro cores 2008-07-24 17:29:00 -07:00
pci use generic_access_phys for /dev/mem mappings 2008-07-24 10:47:15 -07:00
power x86: remove end_pfn in 64bit 2008-07-08 13:10:38 +02:00
vdso Merge branches 'x86/urgent', 'x86/amd-iommu', 'x86/apic', 'x86/cleanups', 'x86/core', 'x86/cpu', 'x86/fixmap', 'x86/gart', 'x86/kprobes', 'x86/memtest', 'x86/modules', 'x86/nmi', 'x86/pat', 'x86/reboot', 'x86/setup', 'x86/step', 'x86/unify-pci', 'x86/uv', 'x86/xen' and 'xen-64bit' into x86/for-linus 2008-07-21 16:37:17 +02:00
video x86: video/fbdev.c: add MODULE_LICENSE 2008-05-04 20:04:46 +02:00
xen xen: don't use sysret for sysexit32 2008-07-24 12:28:12 +02:00
Kconfig x86: lockless get_user_pages_fast() 2008-07-26 12:00:06 -07:00
Kconfig.cpu x86: fix crash due to missing debugctlmsr on AMD K6-3 2008-07-22 14:16:37 +02:00
Kconfig.debug x86: Fix help message for STRICT_DEVMEM config option 2008-07-21 13:04:08 -07:00
Makefile x86, VisWS: turn into generic arch, remove leftover files 2008-07-10 18:55:45 +02:00
Makefile_32.cpu