[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, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/kexec.c b/kernel/kexec.c
index 36c5d9cd4cc1..2c95848fbce8 100644
--- a/kernel/kexec.c
+++ b/kernel/kexec.c
@@ -334,7 +334,7 @@ static struct page *kimage_alloc_pages(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order)
         if (pages) {
                 unsigned int count, i;
                 pages->mapping = NULL;
-                pages->private = order;
+                set_page_private(pages, order);
                 count = 1 << order;
                 for (i = 0; i < count; i++)
                         SetPageReserved(pages + i);
@@ -347,7 +347,7 @@ static void kimage_free_pages(struct page *page)
 {
         unsigned int order, count, i;
 
-        order = page->private;
+        order = page_private(page);
         count = 1 << order;
         for (i = 0; i < count; i++)
                 ClearPageReserved(page + i);