netdev - Re: [PATCH] percpu: add optimized generic percpu accessors

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Message-ID: <20090121234502.66acbcf9@s6510>
Date:	Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:45:01 +1100
From:	Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@...tta.com>
To:	ebiederm@...ssion.com (Eric W. Biederman)
Cc:	Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	Rusty Russell <rusty@...tcorp.com.au>,
	Herbert Xu <herbert@...dor.apana.org.au>,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, hpa@...or.com, brgerst@...il.com,
	cl@...ux-foundation.org, travis@....com,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, steiner@....com, hugh@...itas.com,
	"David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
	Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@...ymtl.ca>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] percpu: add optimized generic percpu accessors

On Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:21:23 -0800
ebiederm@...ssion.com (Eric W. Biederman) wrote:

> Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org> writes:
> 
> > Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >> The larger point still remains: the kernel dominantly uses static percpu 
> >> variables by a margin of 10 to 1, so we cannot just brush away the static 
> >> percpu variables and must concentrate on optimizing that side with 
> >> priority. It's nice if the dynamic percpu-alloc side improves as well, of 
> >> course.
> >
> > Well, the infrequent usage of dynamic percpu allocation is in some
> > part due to the poor implementation, so it's sort of chicken and egg
> > problem.  I got into this percpu thing because I wanted a percpu
> > reference count which can be dynamically allocated and it sucked.
> 
> Counters are our other special case, and counters are interesting
> because they are individually very small.  I just looked and the vast
> majority of the alloc_percpu users are counters.
> 
> I just did a rough count in include/linux/snmp.h  and I came
> up with 171*2 counters.  At 8 bytes per counter that is roughly
> 2.7K.  Or about two thirds of a 4K page.

This is crap. only a small fraction of these SNMP counters are
close enough to the hot path to deserve per-cpu treatment.
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