[PATCH] mm: split page table lock

Christoph Lameter demonstrated very poor scalability on the SGI 512-way, with
a many-threaded application which concurrently initializes different parts of
a large anonymous area.

This patch corrects that, by using a separate spinlock per page table page, to
guard the page table entries in that page, instead of using the mm's single
page_table_lock.  (But even then, page_table_lock is still used to guard page
table allocation, and anon_vma allocation.)

In this implementation, the spinlock is tucked inside the struct page of the
page table page: with a BUILD_BUG_ON in case it overflows - which it would in
the case of 32-bit PA-RISC with spinlock debugging enabled.

Splitting the lock is not quite for free: another cacheline access.  Ideally,
I suppose we would use split ptlock only for multi-threaded processes on
multi-cpu machines; but deciding that dynamically would have its own costs.
So for now enable it by config, at some number of cpus - since the Kconfig
language doesn't support inequalities, let preprocessor compare that with
NR_CPUS.  But I don't think it's worth being user-configurable: for good
testing of both split and unsplit configs, split now at 4 cpus, and perhaps
change that to 8 later.

There is a benefit even for singly threaded processes: kswapd can be attacking
one part of the mm while another part is busy faulting.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 8 deletions

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 0541288..a2995a5 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -154,7 +154,7 @@ static void prep_compound_page(struct page *page, unsigned long order)
 		struct page *p = page + i;
 
 		SetPageCompound(p);
-		p->private = (unsigned long)page;
+		set_page_private(p, (unsigned long)page);
 	}
 }
 
@@ -174,7 +174,7 @@ static void destroy_compound_page(struct page *page, unsigned long order)
 
 		if (!PageCompound(p))
 			bad_page(__FUNCTION__, page);
-		if (p->private != (unsigned long)page)
+		if (page_private(p) != (unsigned long)page)
 			bad_page(__FUNCTION__, page);
 		ClearPageCompound(p);
 	}
@@ -187,18 +187,18 @@ static void destroy_compound_page(struct page *page, unsigned long order)
  * So, we don't need atomic page->flags operations here.
  */
 static inline unsigned long page_order(struct page *page) {
-	return page->private;
+	return page_private(page);
 }
 
 static inline void set_page_order(struct page *page, int order) {
-	page->private = order;
+	set_page_private(page, order);
 	__SetPagePrivate(page);
 }
 
 static inline void rmv_page_order(struct page *page)
 {
 	__ClearPagePrivate(page);
-	page->private = 0;
+	set_page_private(page, 0);
 }
 
 /*
@@ -238,7 +238,7 @@ __find_combined_index(unsigned long page_idx, unsigned int order)
  * (a) the buddy is free &&
  * (b) the buddy is on the buddy system &&
  * (c) a page and its buddy have the same order.
- * for recording page's order, we use page->private and PG_private.
+ * for recording page's order, we use page_private(page) and PG_private.
  *
  */
 static inline int page_is_buddy(struct page *page, int order)
@@ -264,7 +264,7 @@ static inline int page_is_buddy(struct page *page, int order)
  * parts of the VM system.
  * At each level, we keep a list of pages, which are heads of continuous
  * free pages of length of (1 << order) and marked with PG_Private.Page's
- * order is recorded in page->private field.
+ * order is recorded in page_private(page) field.
  * So when we are allocating or freeing one, we can derive the state of the
  * other.  That is, if we allocate a small block, and both were   
  * free, the remainder of the region must be split into blocks.   
@@ -463,7 +463,7 @@ static void prep_new_page(struct page *page, int order)
 	page->flags &= ~(1 << PG_uptodate | 1 << PG_error |
 			1 << PG_referenced | 1 << PG_arch_1 |
 			1 << PG_checked | 1 << PG_mappedtodisk);
-	page->private = 0;
+	set_page_private(page, 0);
 	set_page_refs(page, order);
 	kernel_map_pages(page, 1 << order, 1);
 }