Re: [RFC][PATCH 4/6] SRCU free VMAs

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 10:16:24AM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:

> Hmmm... One optimization to do before we get into these changes is to work
> on allowing the dropping of mmap_sem before we get to sleeping and I/O and
> then reevaluate when I/O etc is complete? This is probably the longest
> hold on mmap_sem that is also frequent. Then it may be easier to use
> standard RCU later.

The hold time isn't relevant, in fact breaking up the mmap_sem such that
we require multiple acquisitions will just increase the cacheline
bouncing.

Also I think it makes more sense to continue an entire fault operation,
including blocking, if at all possible. Every retry will just waste more
time.

Also, there is a lot of possible blocking, there's lock_page,
page_mkwrite() -- which ends up calling into the dirty throttle etc. We
could not possibly retry on all that, the error paths involved would be
horrible for one.

That said, there's a fair bit of code that does allow the retry, and I
think most fault paths actually do the retry on IO.

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