mm/slab: refill cpu cache through a new slab without holding a node lock
Until now, cache growing makes a free slab on node's slab list and then
we can allocate free objects from it. This necessarily requires to hold
a node lock which is very contended. If we refill cpu cache before
attaching it to node's slab list, we can avoid holding a node lock as
much as possible because this newly allocated slab is only visible to
the current task. This will reduce lock contention.
Below is the result of concurrent allocation/free in slab allocation
benchmark made by Christoph a long time ago. I make the output simpler.
The number shows cycle count during alloc/free respectively so less is
better.