Re: [PATCH] vfs: avoid taking locks if inode not in lists

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 05:21:05PM +0200, Eric Dumazet wrote:

If I am not mistaken, we can add unlocked checks on the three hot spots.

After following patch, a close(socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0)) pair on
my dev machine takes ~3us instead of ~9us.

Maybe its better to split it in three patches, just let me know.

I think three patches would be a lot cleaner.

As for safety of the unlocked checks:

 - inode are either hashed when created or never, so that one looks
   fine.
 - same for the sb list.
 - the writeback list is a bit more dynamic as we move things around
   quite a bit.  But in additon to the inode_wb_list_del call from
   evict() it only ever gets remove in writeback_single_inode, which
   for a freeing inode can only be called from the callers of evict().

Btw, I wonder if you should micro-optimize things a bit further by
moving the unhashed checks from the deletion functions into the callers
and thus save a function call for each of them.