On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 11:06:31PM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman
> <gre...@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 07:04:18PM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> >> Because usb_hcd_submit_urb is in the hotest path of usb core,
> >> so use percpu counter to count URB instead of using atomic variable
> >> because atomic operations are much slower than percpu operations.
> >>
> >> Cc: Oliver Neukum <oli...@neukum.org>
> >> Cc: Alan Stern <st...@rowland.harvard.edu>
> >> Signed-off-by: Ming Lei <ming....@canonical.com>
> >> ---
> >>  drivers/usb/core/hcd.c   |    4 ++--
> >>  drivers/usb/core/sysfs.c |    7 ++++++-
> >>  drivers/usb/core/usb.c   |    9 ++++++++-
> >>  drivers/usb/core/usb.h   |    1 +
> >>  include/linux/usb.h      |    2 +-
> >>  5 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
> >
> > And this really speeds things up?  Exactly what does it?
> >
> > And it's not that atomic operations are "slower", it's just that the
> 
> For SMP, atomic_inc/atomic_dec are much slower than percpu
> variable inc/dec, see 4.1(Why Isn’t Concurrent Count-ing Trivial?)
> of [1].
> 
>          However, it is slower: on a Intel Core Duo laptop, it is about six
>          times slower than non-atomic increment when a single thread
>          is incrementing, and more than ten times slower if two threads
>          are incrementing.
> 
> Considered that most of desktop & laptop are SMP now, and with
> USB3.0, the submitted URBs per second may reach tens of thousand
> or more, and we can remove the atomic inc/dec operations in the hot
> path, so why don't do it?

Because you really didn't do it, there are lots of other atomic
operations on that same path.

And, thens of thousands of urbs should be trivial, did you measure this
to see if it changed anything?  I'm not taking patches like this that
are not quantifiable, sorry.

The gating problem in USB right now is the hardware, it's the slowest
thing, not the kernel, from everything I have ever tested, or seen.

Well, bad host controller silicon is also a problem (i.e. raspberry pi),
but there's not much we can do about braindead problems like that...

> > barriers involved can be slower, depending on what else is happening.
> > If you look, you are already hitting atomic variables in the same path,
> > so how can this change speed anything up?
> 
> No, no barriers are involved in atomic_inc/atomic_dec at all.

None?  Hm, you might want to rethink that statement :)

greg k-h
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