Per-VMA locking allows us to lock a struct vm_area_struct without
taking the process-wide mmap lock in read mode.

Consider a process workload where the mmap lock is taken constantly in
write mode. In this scenario, all zerocopy receives are periodically
blocked during that period of time - though in principle, the memory
ranges being used by TCP are not touched by the operations that need
the mmap write lock. This results in performance degradation.

Now consider another workload where the mmap lock is never taken in
write mode, but there are many TCP connections using receive zerocopy
that are concurrently receiving. These connections all take the mmap
lock in read mode, but this does induce a lot of contention and atomic
ops for this process-wide lock. This results in additional CPU
overhead caused by contending on the cache line for this lock.

However, with per-vma locking, both of these problems can be avoided.

As a test, I ran an RPC-style request/response workload with 4KB
payloads and receive zerocopy enabled, with 100 simultaneous TCP
connections. I measured perf cycles within the
find_tcp_vma/mmap_read_lock/mmap_read_unlock codepath, with and
without per-vma locking enabled.

When using process-wide mmap semaphore read locking, about 1% of
measured perf cycles were within this path. With per-VMA locking, this
value dropped to about 0.45%.
Signed-off-by: Arjun Roy <arjunroy@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>