[slub p4 0/7] slub: per cpu partial lists V4

From: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
To: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: tj@kernel.org
Cc: Metathronius Galabant <m.galabant@googlemail.com>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Cc: Adrian Drzewiecki <z@drze.net>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: [slub p4 0/7] slub: per cpu partial lists V4
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:12:21 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20110809211221.831975979@linux.com> (raw)

V3->V4 : Use a single linked per cpu list instead of a per cpu array.
	This results in improvements even for the single threaded
	case. I think this is ready for more widespread testing (-next?)
	The number of partial pages per cpu is configurable via
	/sys/kernel/slab/<name>/cpu_partial

V2->V3 : Work on the todo list. Still some work to be done to reduce
         code impact and make this all cleaner. (Pekka: patch 1-3
         are cleanup patches of general usefulness. You got #1 already
         2+3 could be picked up w/o any issue).

The following patchset introduces per cpu partial lists which allow
a performance increase of around ~10-20% with hackbench on my Sandybridge
processor.

These lists help to avoid per node locking overhead. Allocator latency
could be further reduced by making these operations work without
disabling interrupts (like the fastpath and the free slowpath) but that
is another project.

It is interesting to note that BSD has gone to a scheme with partial
pages only per cpu (source: Adrian). Transfer of cpu ownerships is
done using IPIs. Probably too much overhead for our taste. The approach
here keeps the per node partial lists essentially meaning the "pages"
in there have no cpu owner.