On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 12:32:24AM +0100, Eric Dumazet wrote:

new_inode() dirties a contended cache line to get inode numbers.

Solve this problem by providing to each cpu a per_cpu variable,
feeded by the shared last_ino, but once every 1024 allocations.

This reduce contention on the shared last_ino.

Note : last_ino_get() method must be called with preemption
disabled on SMP.

Looks a little clumsy.  One idea might be to have a special slab for
synthetic inodes using new_inode and only assign it on the first
allocation and after that re-use it.