Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1759226Ab3FMSx1 (ORCPT ); Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:53:27 -0400 Received: from mail-qe0-f49.google.com ([209.85.128.49]:62820 "EHLO mail-qe0-f49.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1759185Ab3FMSxZ (ORCPT ); Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:53:25 -0400 Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:53:18 -0700 From: Tejun Heo To: Andrew Morton Cc: Kent Overstreet , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Oleg Nesterov , Christoph Lameter , Ingo Molnar , Andi Kleen , Jens Axboe , "Nicholas A. Bellinger" , Jeff Layton , "J. Bruce Fields" Subject: Re: [PATCH] Percpu tag allocator Message-ID: <20130613185318.GB12075@mtj.dyndns.org> References: <1371009804-11596-1-git-send-email-koverstreet@google.com> <20130612163854.91da28042ab7a943b69a5970@linux-foundation.org> <20130613020536.GA10979@localhost> <20130612200311.7f9d938a.akpm@linux-foundation.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20130612200311.7f9d938a.akpm@linux-foundation.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1996 Lines: 43 Hello, Andrew, Kent. (cc'ing NFS folks for id[r|a] discussion) On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 08:03:11PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > They all sound like pretty crappy reasons ;) If the idr/ida interface > is nasty then it can be wrapped to provide the same interface as the > percpu tag allocator. > > I could understand performance being an issue, but diligence demands > that we test that, or at least provide a convincing argument. The thing is that id[r|a] guarantee that the lowest available slot is allocated and this is important because it's used to name things which are visible to userland - things like block device minor number, device indicies and so on. That alone pretty much ensures that alloc/free paths can't be very scalable which usually is fine for most id[r|a] use cases as long as lookup is fast. I'm doubtful that it's a good idea to push per-cpu tag allocation into id[r|a]. The use cases are quite different. In fact, maybe what we can do is adding some features on top of the tag allocator and moving id[r|a] users which don't require strict in-order allocation to it. For example, NFS allocates an ID for each transaction it performs and uses it to index the associate command structure (Jeff, Bruce, please correct me if I'm getting it wrong). The only requirement on IDs is that they shouldn't be recycled too fast. Currently, idr implements cyclic mode for it but it can easily be replaced with per-cpu tag allocator like this one and it'd be a lot more scalable. There are a couple things to worry about tho - it probably should use the highbits as generation number as a tag is given out so that the actual ID doesn't get recycled quickly, and some form dynamic tag sizing would be nice too. Thanks. -- tejun -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/