locking: remove spin_lock_prefetch

The only remaining consumer is new_inode, where it showed up in 2001 as
commit c37fa164f793 ("v2.4.9.9 -> v2.4.9.10") in a historical repo [1]
with a changelog which does not mention it.

Since then the line got only touched up to keep compiling.

While it may have been of benefit back in the day, it is guaranteed to
at best not get in the way in the multicore setting -- as the code
performs *a lot* of work between the prefetch and actual lock acquire,
any contention means the cacheline is already invalid by the time the
routine calls spin_lock().  It adds spurious traffic, for short.

On top of it prefetch is notoriously tricky to use for single-threaded
purposes, making it questionable from the get go.

As such, remove it.

I admit upfront I did not see value in benchmarking this change, but I
can do it if that is deemed appropriate.

Removal from new_inode and of the entire thing are in the same patch as
requested by Linus, so whatever weird looks can be directed at that guy.

Link: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tglx/history.git/commit/fs/inode.c?id=c37fa164f793735b32aa3f53154ff1a7659e6442 [1]
Signed-off-by: Mateusz Guzik <mjguzik@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This commit is contained in:
Mateusz Guzik 2023-08-12 18:15:54 +02:00 committed by Linus Torvalds
parent 3feecb1b84
commit c8afaa1b0f
9 changed files with 1 additions and 47 deletions

View file

@ -634,7 +634,6 @@ ia64_imva (void *addr)
#define ARCH_HAS_PREFETCH
#define ARCH_HAS_PREFETCHW
#define ARCH_HAS_SPINLOCK_PREFETCH
#define PREFETCH_STRIDE L1_CACHE_BYTES
static inline void
@ -649,8 +648,6 @@ prefetchw (const void *x)
ia64_lfetch_excl(ia64_lfhint_none, x);
}
#define spin_lock_prefetch(x) prefetchw(x)
extern unsigned long boot_option_idle_override;
enum idle_boot_override {IDLE_NO_OVERRIDE=0, IDLE_HALT, IDLE_FORCE_MWAIT,