Thread (8 messages) flat view 8 messages, 5 authors, 2005-09-13

Re: [patch 7/11] net: Use bigrefs for net_device.refcount

From: Eric Dumazet <hidden>
Date: 2005-09-13 18:28:07
Also in: lkml

Ravikiran G Thirumalai a écrit :
The net_device has a refcnt used to keep track of it's uses.
This is used at the time of unregistering the network device
(module unloading ..) (see netdev_wait_allrefs) .
For loopback_dev , this refcnt increment/decrement  is causing
unnecessary traffic on the interlink for NUMA system
affecting it's performance.  This patch improves tbench numbers by 6% on a
8way x86 Xeon (x445).
  ===================================================================
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
--- alloc_percpu-2.6.13.orig/include/linux/netdevice.h	2005-08-28 16:41:01.000000000 -0700
+++ alloc_percpu-2.6.13/include/linux/netdevice.h	2005-09-12 11:54:21.000000000 -0700
@@ -37,6 +37,7 @@
 #include <linux/config.h>
 #include <linux/device.h>
 #include <linux/percpu.h>
+#include <linux/bigref.h>
 
 struct divert_blk;
 struct vlan_group;
@@ -377,7 +378,7 @@
 	/* device queue lock */
 	spinlock_t		queue_lock;
 	/* Number of references to this device */
-	atomic_t		refcnt;
+	struct bigref	        netdev_refcnt;	
 	/* delayed register/unregister */
 	struct list_head	todo_list;
 	/* device name hash chain */
@@ -677,11 +678,11 @@
Hum...

Did you tried to place refcnt/netdev_refcnt in a separate cache line than 
queue_lock ? I got good results too...

 >  	/* device queue lock */
 >  	spinlock_t		queue_lock;
 >  	/* Number of references to this device */
 > -	atomic_t		refcnt;
 > +	struct bigref	        netdev_refcnt ____cacheline_aligned_in_smp ;	
 >  	/* delayed register/unregister */
 >  	struct list_head	todo_list;
 >  	/* device name hash chain */

Every time a cpu take the queue_lock spinlock, it exclusively gets one cache 
line. If another cpu try to access netdev_refcnt, it has to grab this cache 
line (even if properely per_cpu designed, there is still one shared field). In 
fact the whole struct net_device should be re-ordered for SMP/NUMA performance.

Eric
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