[PATCH] prepare_to_wait/finish_wait sleep/wakeup API
This is worth a whopping 2% on spwecweb on an 8-way. Which is faintly surprising because __wake_up and other wait/wakeup functions are not apparent in the specweb profiles which I've seen. The main objective of this is to reduce the CPU cost of the wait/wakeup operation. When a task is woken up, its waitqueue is removed from the waitqueue_head by the waker (ie: immediately), rather than by the woken process. This means that a subsequent wakeup does not need to revisit the just-woken task. It also means that the just-woken task does not need to take the waitqueue_head's lock, which may well reside in another CPU's cache. I have no decent measurements on the effect of this change - possibly a 20-30% drop in __wake_up cost in Badari's 40-dds-to-40-disks test (it was the most expensive function), but it's inconclusive. And no quantitative testing of which I am aware has been performed by networking people. The API is very simple to use (Linus thought it up): my_func(waitqueue_head_t *wqh) { DEFINE_WAIT(wait); prepare_to_wait(wqh, &wait, TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE); if (!some_test) schedule(); finish_wait(wqh, &wait); } or: DEFINE_WAIT(wait); while (!some_test_1) { prepare_to_wait(wqh, &wait, TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE); if (!some_test_2) schedule(); ... } finish_wait(wqh, &wait); You need to bear in mind that once prepare_to_wait has been performed, your task could be removed from the waitqueue_head and placed into TASK_RUNNING at any time. You don't know whether or not you're still on the waitqueue_head. Running prepare_to_wait() when you're already on the waitqueue_head is fine - it will do the right thing. Running finish_wait() when you're actually not on the waitqueue_head is fine. Running finish_wait() when you've _never_ been on the waitqueue_head is fine, as ling as the DEFINE_WAIT() macro was used to initialise the waitqueue. You don't need to fiddle with current->state. prepare_to_wait() and finish_wait() will do that. finish_wait() will always return in state TASK_RUNNING. There are plenty of usage examples in vm-wakeups.patch and tcp-wakeups.patch.
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