[PATCH] mm: split page table lock

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 doesn't support inequalities, let preprocessor compare that with
NR_CPUS.  But I don't think it's worth being user-configurable: for good
testing of both split and unsplit configs, split now at 4 cpus, and perhaps
change that to 8 later.

There is a benefit even for singly threaded processes: kswapd can be attacking
one part of the mm while another part is busy faulting.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

mm/swap.c

@@ -39,7 +39,7 @@ int page_cluster;
 void put_page(struct page *page)
 {
 	if (unlikely(PageCompound(page))) {
-		page = (struct page *)page->private;
+		page = (struct page *)page_private(page);
 		if (put_page_testzero(page)) {
 			void (*dtor)(struct page *page);