tmpfs: optimize clearing when writing
Nick proposed years ago that tmpfs should avoid clearing its pages where write will overwrite them with new data, as ramfs has long done. But I messed it up and just got bad data. Tried again recently, it works fine. Here's time output for writing 4GiB 16 times on this Core i5 laptop: before: real 0m21.169s user 0m0.028s sys 0m21.057s real 0m21.382s user 0m0.016s sys 0m21.289s real 0m21.311s user 0m0.020s sys 0m21.217s after: real 0m18.273s user 0m0.032s sys 0m18.165s real 0m18.354s user 0m0.020s sys 0m18.265s real 0m18.440s user 0m0.032s sys 0m18.337s ramfs: real 0m16.860s user 0m0.028s sys 0m16.765s real 0m17.382s user 0m0.040s sys 0m17.273s real 0m17.133s user 0m0.044s sys 0m17.021s Yes, I have done perf reports, but they need more explanation than they deserve: in summary, clear_page vanishes, its cache loading shifts into copy_user_generic_unrolled; shmem_getpage_gfp goes down, and surprisingly mark_page_accessed goes way up - I think because they are respectively where the cache gets to be reloaded after being purged by clear or copy. Suggested-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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