On Fri, Aug 04, 2006 at 11:23:50AM -0400, Neale Ferguson wrote:
> Reiser still makes extensive use of the BKL (Big Kernel Lock). In 2.4 ext3
> appeared to use it a lot too. What is the state of play with ext3 and BKL in
> 2.6. Just looking at the source I couldn't find any references to
> lock_kernel. The locks appear to be local (buffer, ext3_handler ...). I know
> there were significant performance improvements shown in some benchmarks run
> on 2.6 compared to those on 2.4 and also scalability improvements. The
> latter indicates a lesser reliance on things like BKL.
ext3 in current 2.6 mainline doesn't use the BKL anymore. The changes
happen during the 2.6 series, I think 2.6.5 and thus SLES9 still used
the BKL. If you care about this topic the OLS paper from Dave Chinner
has some nice figures on large system scaling of different filesystems:
https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/reprints/chinner-reprint.pdf
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