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  • Jens Axboe's avatar
    block: optimize generic_unplug_device() · dbaf2c00
    Jens Axboe authored
    
    
    Original patch from Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
    
    Mike Anderson was doing an OLTP benchmark on a computer with 48 physical
    disks mapped to one logical device via device mapper.
    
    He found that there was a slowdown on request_queue->lock in function
    generic_unplug_device. The slowdown is caused by the fact that when some
    code calls unplug on the device mapper, device mapper calls unplug on all
    physical disks. These unplug calls take the lock, find that the queue is
    already unplugged, release the lock and exit.
    
    With the below patch, performance of the benchmark was increased by 18%
    (the whole OLTP application, not just block layer microbenchmarks).
    
    So I'm submitting this patch for upstream. I think the patch is correct,
    because when more threads call simultaneously plug and unplug, it is
    unspecified, if the queue is or isn't plugged (so the patch can't make
    this worse). And the caller that plugged the queue should unplug it
    anyway. (if it doesn't, there's 3ms timeout).
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
    dbaf2c00