The file_lock spinlock sits close to mostly read fields of 'struct
files_struct'
In SMP (and NUMA) environments, each time a thread wants to open or close
a file, it has to acquire the spinlock, thus invalidating the cache line
containing this spinlock on other CPUS. So other threads doing
read()/write()/... calls that use RCU to access the file table are going
to ask further memory (possibly NUMA) transactions to read again this
memory line.
Move the spinlock to another cache line, so that concurrent threads can
share the cache line containing 'count' and 'fdt' fields.
It's worth up to 9% on a microbenchmark using a 4-thread 2-package x86
machine. See
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=112680448713342&w=2
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <dada1@cosmosbay.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
95e861db3e