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As the kernel allocates and frees vnodes, it fully initializes them

Description

As the kernel allocates and frees vnodes, it fully initializes them
on every allocation and fully releases them on every free. These
are not trivial costs: it starts by zeroing a large structure then
initializes a mutex, a lock manager lock, an rw lock, four lists,
and six pointers. And looking at vfs.vnodes_created, these operations
are being done millions of times an hour on a busy machine.

As a performance optimization, this code update uses the uma_init
and uma_fini routines to do these initializations and cleanups only
as the vnodes enter and leave the vnode_zone. With this change the
initializations are only done kern.maxvnodes times at system startup
and then only rarely again. The frees are done only if the vnode_zone
shrinks which never happens in practice. For those curious about the
avoided work, look at the vnode_init() and vnode_fini() functions in
kern/vfs_subr.c to see the code that has been removed from the main
vnode allocation/free path.

Reviewed by: kib
Tested by: Peter Holm

Details

Provenance
mckusickAuthored on
Reviewer
kib
Parents
rS291459: For performance reasons, it is useful to have a single string used as
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