follow_hugetlb_page() walks a range of user virtual address and then fills
in list of struct page * into an array that is passed from the argument
list. It also gets a reference count via get_page(). For compound page,
get_page() actually traverse back to head page via page_private() macro and
then adds a reference count to the head page. Since we are doing a virt to
pte look up, kernel already has a struct page pointer into the head page.
So instead of traverse into the small unit page struct and then follow a
link back to the head page, optimize that with incrementing the reference
count directly on the head page.
The benefit is that we don't take a cache miss on accessing page struct for
the corresponding user address and more importantly, not to pollute the
cache with a "not very useful" round trip of pointer chasing. This adds a
moderate performance gain on an I/O intensive database transaction
workload.
Signed-off-by: Ken Chen <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com>
Cc: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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