Commit 30d697fa authored Feb 23, 2009 by Salman Qazi Committed by Ingo Molnar Feb 24, 2009

x86: fix performance regression in write() syscall



While the introduction of __copy_from_user_nocache (see commit:
0812a579) may have been an improvement
for sufficiently large writes, there is evidence to show that it is
deterimental for small writes.  Unixbench's fstime test gives the
following results for 256 byte writes with MAX_BLOCK of 2000:

    2.6.29-rc6 ( 5 samples, each in KB/sec ):
    283750, 295200, 294500, 293000, 293300

    2.6.29-rc6 + this patch (5 samples, each in KB/sec):
    313050, 3106750, 293350, 306300, 307900

    2.6.18
    395700, 342000, 399100, 366050, 359850

    See w_test() in src/fstime.c in unixbench version 4.1.0.  Basically, the above test
    consists of counting how much we can write in this manner:

    alarm(10);
    while (!sigalarm) {
            for (f_blocks = 0; f_blocks < 2000; ++f_blocks) {
                   write(f, buf, 256);
            }
            lseek(f, 0L, 0);
    }

Note, there are other components to the write syscall regression
that are not addressed here.

Signed-off-by: Salman Qazi <sqazi@google.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

parent cb425afd

arch/x86/include/asm/uaccess_64.h

+14 −2

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -192,14 +192,26 @@ static inline int __copy_from_user_nocache(void dst, const void __user src,
		unsigned size)
		{
		might_sleep();
		/*
		* In practice this limit means that large file write()s
		* which get chunked to 4K copies get handled via
		* non-temporal stores here. Smaller writes get handled
		* via regular __copy_from_user():
		*/
		if (likely(size >= PAGE_SIZE))
		return __copy_user_nocache(dst, src, size, 1);
		else
		return __copy_from_user(dst, src, size);
		}

		static inline int __copy_from_user_inatomic_nocache(void *dst,
		const void __user *src,
		unsigned size)
		{
		if (likely(size >= PAGE_SIZE))
		return __copy_user_nocache(dst, src, size, 0);
		else
		return __copy_from_user_inatomic(dst, src, size);
		}

		unsigned long