x86, pat: Update the page flags for memtype atomically instead of using memtype_lock

While testing an application using the xpmem (out of kernel) driver, we
noticed a significant page fault rate reduction of x86_64 with respect
to ia64.  For one test running with 32 cpus, one thread per cpu, it
took 01:08 for each of the threads to vm_insert_pfn 2GB worth of pages.
For the same test running on 256 cpus, one thread per cpu, it took 14:48
to vm_insert_pfn 2 GB worth of pages.

The slowdown was tracked to lookup_memtype which acquires the
spinlock memtype_lock.  This heavily contended lock was slowing down
vm_insert_pfn().

With the cmpxchg on page->flags method, both the 32 cpu and 256 cpu
cases take approx 00:01.3 seconds to complete.

Signed-off-by: Robin Holt <holt@sgi.com>
LKML-Reference: <20100423153627.751194346@gulag1.americas.sgi.com>
Cc: Venkatesh Pallipadi <venkatesh.pallipadi@gmail.com>
Cc: Rafael Wysocki <rjw@novell.com>
Reviewed-by: Suresh Siddha <suresh.b.siddha@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions