low the very large SMP machines -- requested by some people at OLS, and there seem to have been a few recent patches in the 4096-CPU direction as well. The general idea is to move to a much more conservative concurrency design, then apply a hierarchy to reduce contention on the global lock by a few orders of magnitude (larger machines would see greater reductions). The reason for taking a conservative approach is that this code isn't on any fast path. Prototype in progress. This patch is against the linux-tip git tree (tip/core/rcu). If you wish to test this against 2.6.26, use the following set of patches: http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/patches/2.6.26-ljsimp-1.patch http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/patches/2.6.26-ljsimpfix-3.patch The first patch combines commits 5127bed588a2f8f3a1f732de2a8a190b7df5dce3 and 3cac97cbb14aed00d83eb33d4613b0fe3aaea863 from Lai Jiangshan , and the second patch contains my changes. Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar pէ