[PATCH] mm: split page table lock

Christoph Lameter demonstrated very poor scalability on the SGI 512-way, with
a many-threaded application which concurrently initializes different parts of
a large anonymous area.

This patch corrects that, by using a separate spinlock per page table page, to
guard the page table entries in that page, instead of using the mm's single
page_table_lock.  (But even then, page_table_lock is still used to guard page
table allocation, and anon_vma allocation.)

In this implementation, the spinlock is tucked inside the struct page of the
page table page: with a BUILD_BUG_ON in case it overflows - which it would in
the case of 32-bit PA-RISC with spinlock debugging enabled.

Splitting the lock is not quite for free: another cacheline access.  Ideally,
I suppose we would use split ptlock only for multi-threaded processes on
multi-cpu machines; but deciding that dynamically would have its own costs.
So for now enable it by config, at some number of cpus - since the Kconfig
language doesn't support inequalities, let preprocessor compare that with
NR_CPUS.  But I don't think it's worth being user-configurable: for good
testing of both split and unsplit configs, split now at 4 cpus, and perhaps
change that to 8 later.

There is a benefit even for singly threaded processes: kswapd can be attacking
one part of the mm while another part is busy faulting.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/arch/i386/mm/pgtable.c b/arch/i386/mm/pgtable.c
index dcdce2c6c532..39c099f15b5f 100644
--- a/arch/i386/mm/pgtable.c
+++ b/arch/i386/mm/pgtable.c
@@ -188,19 +188,19 @@ static inline void pgd_list_add(pgd_t *pgd)
         struct page *page = virt_to_page(pgd);
         page->index = (unsigned long)pgd_list;
         if (pgd_list)
-                pgd_list->private = (unsigned long)&page->index;
+                set_page_private(pgd_list, (unsigned long)&page->index);
         pgd_list = page;
-        page->private = (unsigned long)&pgd_list;
+        set_page_private(page, (unsigned long)&pgd_list);
 }
 
 static inline void pgd_list_del(pgd_t *pgd)
 {
         struct page *next, **pprev, *page = virt_to_page(pgd);
         next = (struct page *)page->index;
-        pprev = (struct page **)page->private;
+        pprev = (struct page **)page_private(page);
         *pprev = next;
         if (next)
-                next->private = (unsigned long)pprev;
+                set_page_private(next, (unsigned long)pprev);
 }
 
 void pgd_ctor(void *pgd, kmem_cache_t *cache, unsigned long unused)