[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, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/Kconfig b/mm/Kconfig
index 391ffc54d136..f35a550ba4b9 100644
--- a/mm/Kconfig
+++ b/mm/Kconfig
@@ -111,3 +111,16 @@ config SPARSEMEM_STATIC
 config SPARSEMEM_EXTREME
         def_bool y
         depends on SPARSEMEM && !SPARSEMEM_STATIC
+
+# Heavily threaded applications may benefit from splitting the mm-wide
+# page_table_lock, so that faults on different parts of the user address
+# space can be handled with less contention: split it at this NR_CPUS.
+# Default to 4 for wider testing, though 8 might be more appropriate.
+# ARM's adjust_pte (unused if VIPT) depends on mm-wide page_table_lock.
+# PA-RISC's debug spinlock_t is too large for the 32-bit struct page.
+#
+config SPLIT_PTLOCK_CPUS
+        int
+        default "4096" if ARM && !CPU_CACHE_VIPT
+        default "4096" if PARISC && DEBUG_SPINLOCK && !64BIT
+        default "4"