Re: [PATCH 1/3] lglock: remove online variants of lock

[Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>]

On Tue, 8 May 2012 05:50:44 +0100, Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, May 08, 2012 at 01:29:45PM +0930, Rusty Russell wrote:
> > Optimizing the slow paths adds a lot of complexity.  If you need to
> > grab every lock often, you have other problems.
> 
> Applied, but I'm not too happy about the situation with vfsmount_lock ;-/
> On kernels built for a lot of possible CPUs the loss of ..._online()
> versions will get painful.

My original motivation was to get rid of that cpumask_t (and replace it
with a cpumask_var_t).  A simple enough patch, but I couldn't bring
myself to leave that complex logic in place without clear justification.

> OTOH, we can always put the map + single
> spinlock + single notifier into lglock.c and reproduce the old logics.
> I'll do a patch along those lines and put it on a separate branch;
> then we'll be able to test and compare.

I'll be interested in the results: virtual systems are classic for
wanting large # of CPUs which aren't actually online, so we might
actually care.

I'd also like to get rid of the cpu_possible_map altogether, and just
have NR_CPUS/nr_cpu_ids, since last I checked no arch really wants
sparse numbers.

Cheers,
Rusty.