Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:02:46 -0700
From: Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>
To: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Nathan Fontenot <nfont@austin.ibm.com>, Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] memory hotplug disable boot option
Message-ID: <20100628150246.GA13192@suse.de>
References: <87d3vfeage.fsf@basil.nowhere.org>
 <4C24C279.3050206@austin.ibm.com>
 <20100628110658.387B.A69D9226@jp.fujitsu.com>
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On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 11:20:27AM +0900, KOSAKI Motohiro wrote:
> > On 06/25/2010 04:19 AM, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > > KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> writes:
> > > 
> > >>> Proposed patch to disable memory hotplug via a boot option,
> > >>> mem_hotplug=[on|off].  The patch only disables memory hotplug in that it 
> > >>> prevents the creation of the memory sysfs directories for memory sections.
> > >>>
> > >>> This patch is meant to help alleviate very long boot times on systems with
> > >>> large memory (1+ TB) and many memory sections (10's of thousands).
> > >>
> > >> Why making simple /sys file is so slowly? Couldn't we fix such performance
> > >> problem?
> > 
> > The issue is the large number of sysfs memory directories that get created.
> > On a system with 1 TB of memory I am seeing ~63,00 directories.  The long
> > creation time is due to the string compare check in sysfs code to ensure
> > we are not creating a directory with a duplicate name.
> 
> Ah, I see. probably this is sysfs issue. So Let's cc Greg and Eric.
> Greg, I have dumb question. Why sysfs call strcmp() so heavily? I mean why sysfs
> don't have hash based name dupliation check?

Because we have not needed such complexity before.

You might want to take a step back and asky why you are creating 63
thousand directories in sysfs for large memory systems.  Are you really
going to use all of those directories?  What are they for?  Perhaps
someone created the wrong interface to memory and that needs to be fixed
instead?

And as always, patches are welcome :)

thanks,

greg k-h
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