Commit be852795 authored by Eric Dumazet's avatar Eric Dumazet Committed by Linus Torvalds
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alloc_percpu() fails to allocate percpu data

Some oprofile results obtained while using tbench on a 2x2 cpu machine were
very surprising.

For example, loopback_xmit() function was using high number of cpu cycles
to perform the statistic updates, supposed to be real cheap since they use
percpu data

        pcpu_lstats = netdev_priv(dev);
        lb_stats = per_cpu_ptr(pcpu_lstats, smp_processor_id());
        lb_stats->packets++;  /* HERE : serious contention */
        lb_stats->bytes += skb->len;

struct pcpu_lstats is a small structure containing two longs.  It appears
that on my 32bits platform, alloc_percpu(8) allocates a single cache line,
instead of giving to each cpu a separate cache line.

Using the following patch gave me impressive boost in various benchmarks
( 6 % in tbench)
(all percpu_counters hit this bug too)

Long term fix (ie >= 2.6.26) would be to let each CPU allocate their own
block of memory, so that we dont need to roudup sizes to L1_CACHE_BYTES, or
merging the SGI stuff of course....
parent e3892296
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