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Hugh Dickins authored
Christoph Lameter demonstrated very poor scalability on the SGI 512-way, with a many-threaded application which concurrently initializes different parts of a large anonymous area. This patch corrects that, by using a separate spinlock per page table page, to guard the page table entries in that page, instead of using the mm's single page_table_lock. (But even then, page_table_lock is still used to guard page table allocation, and anon_vma allocation.) In this implementation, the spinlock is tucked inside the struct page of the page table page: with a BUILD_BUG_ON in case it overflows - which it would in the case of 32-bit PA-RISC with spinlock debugging enabled. Splitting the lock is not quite for free: another cacheline access. Ideally, I suppose we would use split ptlock only for multi-threaded processes on multi-cpu machines; but deciding that dynamically would have its own costs. So for now enable it by config, at some number of cpus - since the Kconfig language ...
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