[PATCH] notifiers: fix blocking_notifier_call_chain() scalability
while lock-profiling the -rt kernel i noticed weird contention during mmap-intense workloads, and the tracer showed the following gem, in one of our MM hotpaths: threaded-2771 1.... 65us : sys_munmap (sysenter_do_call) threaded-2771 1.... 66us : profile_munmap (sys_munmap) threaded-2771 1.... 66us : blocking_notifier_call_chain (profile_munmap) threaded-2771 1.... 66us : rt_down_read (blocking_notifier_call_chain) ouch! a global rw-semaphore taken in one of the most performance- sensitive codepaths of the kernel. And i dont even have oprofile enabled! All distro kernels have CONFIG_PROFILING enabled, so this scalability problem affects the majority of Linux users. The fix is to enhance blocking_notifier_call_chain() to only take the lock if there appears to be work on the call-chain. With this patch applied i get nicely saturated system, and much higher munmap performance, on SMP systems. And as a bonus this also fixes a similar scalability bottleneck in the thread-exit codepath: profile_task_exit() ... Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Acked-by: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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