[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, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/mm/rmap.c b/mm/rmap.c
index a84bdfe..a33e779 100644
--- a/mm/rmap.c
+++ b/mm/rmap.c
@@ -274,7 +274,7 @@ pte_t *page_check_address(struct page *page, struct mm_struct *mm,
 		return NULL;
 	}
 
-	ptl = &mm->page_table_lock;
+	ptl = pte_lockptr(mm, pmd);
 	spin_lock(ptl);
 	if (pte_present(*pte) && page_to_pfn(page) == pte_pfn(*pte)) {
 		*ptlp = ptl;
@@ -550,7 +550,7 @@ static int try_to_unmap_one(struct page *page, struct vm_area_struct *vma)
 	update_hiwater_rss(mm);
 
 	if (PageAnon(page)) {
-		swp_entry_t entry = { .val = page->private };
+		swp_entry_t entry = { .val = page_private(page) };
 		/*
 		 * Store the swap location in the pte.
 		 * See handle_pte_fault() ...