Re: vmlocking2 branch merged

[Greg Oster <oster%cs.usask.ca@localhost>]

Andrew Doran writes:
> Hi,
> 
> The vmlocking2 branch was merged into -current earlier today. The global
> kernel_lock is now mostly confined to the network stacks, device drivers and
> a few file systems like LFS. For many paths in the kernel, it's no longer
> taken. When using an machine with multiple CPUs, the system should perform
> better on many workoads.
> 
> There are some known bugs which I am working on, and without doubt more
> will be discovered:
> 
> - Write activity to an LFS file system can cause the system to deadlock.
> - Unmounting a busy tmpfs can cause a kernel assertion to fail.
> 
> For those interested in numbers I did a quick test. The same user install,
> machine, source tree etc. were used for all three runs. Note that it's not
> an ideal test, the sampling is inaccurate, etc. Also note that with 4 CPUs,
> user + system time is close to 4x real time for a fully loaded machine:
> 
> make -j16 cleandir:
> 95.13s real   147.05s user   262.35s system   NetBSD 4.0 
> 90.38s real   134.65s user   210.30s system   NetBSD 4.99.47
> 63.94s real   135.64s user   103.73s system   NetBSD 4.99.48
> 
> So on this system, the kernel part of make -j16 cleandir is now about 2.5
> times quicker than NetBSD 4.

On a 2.66GHz Dual Quad-Core box I see './build.sh -j 16 ... release' 
come in at about 33 minutes under a 4.99.47 kernel.  Under a 4.99.48 
kernel on that machine, the same build is done in 23 minutes, a 
whopping 30% improvement!!! 

> Note that a large part of this work was funded by donations to The NetBSD
> Foundation - thank you to everyone who has donated. Also, thank you to
> everyone who spent time to code for / test the branch, especially YAMAMOTO
> Takashi who put a huge amount of time and effort into it.

And, of course, to you, for all the efforts you've put in as well... 

Later...

Greg Oster