Christoph Hellwig's on June 21, 2019 6:15 pm:

On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 10:21:46AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

Hmm. Honestly, I've never seen anything like that in any kernel profiles.

Compared to the problems I _do_ see (which is usually the obvious
cache misses, and locking), it must either be in the noise or it's
some problem specific to whatever CPU you are doing performance work
on?

I've occasionally seen pipeline hiccups in profiles, but it's usually
been either some serious glass jaw of the core, or it's been something
really stupid we did (or occasionally that the compiler did: one in
particular I remember was how there was a time when gcc would narrow
stores when it could, so if you set a bit in a word, it would do it
with a byte store, and then when you read the whole word afterwards
you'd get a major pipeline stall and it happened to show up in some
really hot paths).

I've not seen any difference in the GUP bench output here ar all.

But I'm fine with skipping this patch for now, I have a potential
series I'm looking into that would benefit a lot from it, but we
can discusss it in that context and make sure all the other works gets in
in time.

If you can, that would be good. I don't like to object based on
handwaving so I'll see if I can find any benchmarks that will give
better confidence. Those old TPC-C tests were good, and there was
some DB2 workload that was the reason I added gup fast in the first
place. I'll do some digging.

Thanks,
Nick