From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2008 05:18:58 +0200 From: Nick Piggin Subject: Re: MMU notifiers review and some proposals Message-ID: <20080726031858.GB18896@wotan.suse.de> References: <20080724143949.GB12897@wotan.suse.de> <20080725232907.GA243187@sgi.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20080725232907.GA243187@sgi.com> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Jack Steiner Cc: Andrew Morton , Linus Torvalds , Linux Memory Management List , linux-arch@vger.kernel.org, andrea@qumranet.com, cl@linux-foundation.org List-ID: On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 06:29:09PM -0500, Jack Steiner wrote: > > > > I also think we should be cautious to make this slowpath so horribly > > slow. For KVM it's fine, but perhaps for GRU we'd actually want to > > register quite a lot of notifiers, unregister them, and perhaps even > > do per-vma registrations if we don't want to slow down other memory > > management operations too much (eg. if it is otherwise just some > > regular processes just doing accelerated things with GRU). > > I can't speak for other possible users of the mmu notifier mechanism > but the GRU will only register a single notifier for a process. > The notifier is registered when the GRU is opened and (currently) > unregistered when the GRU is closed. > > If a task opens multiple GRUs (quite possible for threaded apps), all > shared the same notifier. Regardless of the number of threads/opens, > there will be a single notifier. OK, sure, but you might have a lot of processes opening the GRU, no? (I'm not sure how it is exactly going to be used, but if you have a number of GRU units per blade...) So you have a machine with 4096 CPUs, and maybe 4096 processes that each have to lock the mapping of exec, glibc, pthreads, grulib, etc etc. Or you might have a situation where many short lived processes do some operating on GRU. Anyway, I won't dispute your data point (thanks for that), but still noting that a very heavy registration is obviously less desirable than a faster one, all else being equal... -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org