On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 10:10:25PM +1100, Anton Blanchard wrote:

Nick Piggin discovered that lwsync barriers around locks were faster than isync
on 970. That was a long time ago and I completely dropped the ball in testing
his patches across other ppc64 processors.

Turns out the idea helps on other chips. Using a microbenchmark that
uses a lot of threads to contend on a global pthread mutex (and therefore a
global futex), POWER6 improves 8% and POWER7 improves 2%. I checked POWER5
and while I couldn't measure an improvement, there was no regression.

Ah, good to see this one come back. I also tested tbench over localhost
btw which actually did show some speedup on the G5. 

BTW. this was the last thing left:
http://www.mail-archive.com/linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org/msg29738.html

Don't know if you took a look at that again, but maybe it's worth
looking at. Hmm, we do actually seem to be growing number of smp_mb*
calls in core kernel too.