We tried very hard to remove all possible dev_hold()/dev_put() pairs in
network stack, using RCU conversions.
There is still an unavoidable device refcount change for every dst we
create/destroy, and this can slow down some workloads (routers or some
app servers, mmap af_packet)
We can switch to a percpu refcount implementation, now dynamic per_cpu
infrastructure is mature. On a 64 cpus machine, this consumes 256 bytes
per device.
On x86, dev_hold(dev) code :
before
lock incl 0x280(%ebx)
after:
movl 0x260(%ebx),%eax
incl fs:(%eax)