Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1161081AbXALV0I (ORCPT ); Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:26:08 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1161084AbXALV0H (ORCPT ); Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:26:07 -0500 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.24]:35192 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1161081AbXALV0G (ORCPT ); Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:26:06 -0500 Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:25:50 -0800 From: Andrew Morton To: Christoph Lameter Cc: Ravikiran G Thirumalai , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, Andi Kleen , "Shai Fultheim (Shai@scalex86.org)" , pravin b shelar Subject: Re: High lock spin time for zone->lru_lock under extreme conditions Message-Id: <20070112132550.dc007698.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: References: <20070112160104.GA5766@localhost.localdomain> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 2.2.7 (GTK+ 2.8.6; i686-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1033 Lines: 24 On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 11:46:22 -0800 (PST) Christoph Lameter wrote: > > While the softlockups and the like went away by enabling interrupts during > > spinning, as mentioned in http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/1/3/29 , > > Andi thought maybe this is exposing a problem with zone->lru_locks and > > hence warrants a discussion on lkml, hence this post. Are there any > > plans/patches/ideas to address the spin time under such extreme conditions? > > Could this be a hardware problem? Some issue with atomic ops in the > Sun hardware? I'd assume so. We don't hold lru_lock for 33 seconds ;) Probably similar symptoms are demonstrable using other locks, if a suitable workload is chosen. Increasing PAGEVEC_SIZE might help. But we do allocate those things on the stack. - 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/