linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v7 1/4] spinlock: A new lockref structure for lockless update of refcount

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:	Fri, 30 Aug 2013 08:28:33 -0700
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>
Cc:	Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>,
	Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@...com>,
	Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
	Jeff Layton <jlayton@...hat.com>,
	Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@...e.cz>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>,
	"Chandramouleeswaran, Aswin" <aswin@...com>,
	"Norton, Scott J" <scott.norton@...com>,
	Michael Neuling <michael.neuling@....ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v7 1/4] spinlock: A new lockref structure for lockless
 update of refcount

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org> wrote:
>
> * Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
>> > BTW. Do you have your test case at hand ?
>>
>> My test-case is a joke. It's explicitly *trying* to get as much
>> contention as possible on a dentry, by just starting up a lot of threads
>> that look up one single pathname (the same one for everybody). It
>> defaults to using /tmp for this, but you can specify the filename.
>
> Waiman's tests seemed to use sufficiently generic and varied workloads
> (AIM7) and they showed pretty nice unconditional improvements with his
> variant of this scheme, so I think testing with your simple testcase that
> intentionally magnifies the scalability issue is 100% legit and may in
> fact help tune the changes more accurately, because it has less inherent
> noise.

Yes. However, what I am (not very) worried about is that people will
hit some particular codepath that ends up having bad behavior.

I think I covered all the normal hotpaths in pathname lookup, which is
why I'm not *that* worried, but it's still the case that my silly
test-case is very limited. It's limited for a good *reason* (to try to
show the worst-case scalability problem), but it's limited.

              Linus
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/