This patch speeds up lmbench lat_mmap test by about 8%. lat_mmap is set up
basically to mmap a 64MB file on tmpfs, fault in its pages, then unmap it.
A microbenchmark yes, but it exercises some important paths in the mm.
Before:
avg = 501.9
std = 14.7773
After:
avg = 462.286
std = 5.46106
(50 runs of each, stddev gives a reasonable confidence, but there is quite
a bit of variation there still)
It does this by removing the complex per-cpu locking and counter-cache and
replaces it with a percpu counter in struct vfsmount. This makes the code
much simpler, and avoids spinlocks (although the msync is still pretty
costly, unfortunately). It results in about 900 bytes smaller code too. It
does increase the size of a vfsmount, however.
It should also give a speedup on large systems if CPUs are frequently operating
on different mounts (because the existing scheme has to operate on an atomic in
the struct vfsmount when switching between mounts). But I'm most interested in
the single threaded path performance for the moment.
[AV: minor cleanup]
Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>