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Date:      Wed, 19 Feb 2003 17:30:20 -0700
From:      Scott Long <scott_long@btc.adaptec.com>
To:        Mike Silbersack <silby@silby.com>
Cc:        Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>, Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org>, src-committers@freebsd.org, cvs-src@freebsd.org, cvs-all@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/dev/aac aac.c aac_pci.c
Message-ID:  <3E54219C.9030103@btc.adaptec.com>
In-Reply-To: <200302192158.h1JLwYJn025529@repoman.freebsd.org>
References:  <200302192158.h1JLwYJn025529@repoman.freebsd.org>    <20030219161458.T62705@patrocles.silby.com> <20030219181629.A46948@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> <20030219182122.N62705@patrocles.silby.com>

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Mike Silbersack wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
>
>
> >What I did when I made my out-of-tree Myrinet driver MPSAFE was to
> >basically make my own big dumb lock.  Except that the lock is
> >per-softc, rather than for the whole kernel.  Eg, I enter my transmit
> >routine and acquire my dumb lock, releasing it when I leave.
> >Similarly for the interrupt routine.  My driver is simple, and uses
> >neither miibus nor busdma, which may be possible places where you
> >could get into trouble.  I've beaten the snot out of it, and seen no
> >LOR's and no deadlocks, and a huge performance boost -- back to nearly
> >80% of 4.x for some netperf workloads from 60% or so (sorry for the
> >vague generalizations).
> >
> >I should probably get the lock in my ioctl routine, but I haven't
> >bothered so far.
> >
> >I'd love to see you make if_xl MPSAFE.
> >
> >Drew
>
>
> Ugh, miibus, I had forgotten about that... well, I guess it'll take a bit
> of work to doublecheck everything.  The busdma routines are already
> MPSAFE, aren't they?  I haven't checked, but I'd assume so, given how new
> they are. :)


busdma has been around since 3.0.  It probably needs a couple of hours
of work to lock it down.

>
> I tried looking back to find the original message where you talked about
> the performance boost, but I can't find it now.  Refresh my memory; was
> the speedup present on UP systems as well?  I don't have any SMP boxes
> here, so I'm curious as to what extent I'd be able to benchmark a
> difference.


I've seen performance gains as high as 20%.  Presumably this is because
you eliminate the two extra context switches that result from blocking
on Giant.  I doubt that you'll see much gain in a UP system, but I
haven't benchmarked it.  Once Peter commits his lazy context switching
patches, this gain won't be as dramatic anymore.

Scott


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