at no objects were
put back by the remote processor then it will retrieve a new slab (from the
partial lists or from the page allocator) and start with a whole
new set of objects while the remote thread may still be freeing objects to
the old cpu slab. This may then repeat until the new slab is also exhausted.
If remote freeing has freed objects in the earlier slab then that earlier
slab will now be on the partial freelist and the allocating thread will
pick that slab next for allocation. So the loop is extended. However,
both threads need to take the list_lock to make the swizzling via
the partial list happen.

It is likely that this kind of scheme will keep the objects being passed
around to a small set that can be kept in the cpu caches leading to increased
performance.

More code cleanups become possible:

- Instead of passing a cpu we can now pass a kmem_cache_cpu structure around.
  Allows reducing the number of parameters to various functions.
- Can define a new node_match() function for NUMA to encapsulate locality
  checks.

Effect on allocations:

Cachelines touched before this patch:

	Write:	page cache struct and first cacheline of object

Cachelines touched after this patch:

	Write:	kmem_cache_cpu cacheline and first cacheline of object
	Read: page cache struct (but see later patch that avoids touching
		that cacheline)

The handling when the lockless alloc list runs empty gets to be a bit more
complicated since another cacheline has now to be written to. But that is
halfway out of the hot path.

Effect on freeing:

Cachelines touched before this patch:

	Write: page_struct and first cacheline of object

Cachelines touched after this patch depending on how we free:

  Write(to cpu_slab):	kmem_cache_cpu struct and first cacheline of object
  Write(to other):	page struct and first cacheline of object

  Read(to cpu_slab):	page struct to id slab etc. (but see later patch that
  			avoids touching the page struct on free)
  Read(to other):	cpu local kmem_cache_cpu struct to verify its not
  			the cpu slab.

Summary:

Pro:
	- Distinct cachelines so that concurrent remote frees and local
	  allocs on a cpuslab can occur without cacheline bouncing.
	- Avoids potential bouncing cachelines because of neighboring
	  per cpu pointer updates in kmem_cache's cpu_slab structure since
	  it now grows to a cacheline (Therefore remove the comment
	  that talks about that concern).

Cons:
	- Freeing objects now requires the reading of one additional
	  cacheline. That can be mitigated for some cases by the following
	  patches but its not possible to completely eliminate these
	  references.

	- Memory usage grows slightly.

	The size of each per cpu object is blown up from one word
	(pointing to the page_struct) to one cacheline with various data.
	So this is NR_CPUS*NR_SLABS*L1_BYTES more memory use. Lets say
	NR_SLABS is 100 and a cache line size of 128 then we have just
	increased SLAB metadata requirements by 12.8k per cpu.
	(Another later patch reduces these requirements)

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
D½’@›