From: Mikulas Patocka Remove the spinlock protecting the pages allocation. The spinlock is only taken on initialization or from single-threaded workqueue. Therefore, the spinlock is useless. The spinlock is taken in kcopyd_get_pages and kcopyd_put_pages. kcopyd_get_pages is only called from run_pages_job, which is only called from process_jobs called from do_work. kcopyd_put_pages is called from client_alloc_pages (which is initialization function) or from run_complete_job. run_complete_job is only called from process_jobs called from do_work. Another spinlock, kc->job_lock is taken each time someone pushes or pops some work for the worker thread. Once we take kc->job_lock, we guarantee that any written memory is visible to the other CPUs. Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon --- drivers/md/dm-kcopyd.c | 11 +---------- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 10 deletions(-) Index: linux-2.6.39/drivers/md/dm-kcopyd.c =================================================================== --- linux-2.6.39.orig/drivers/md/dm-kcopyd.c +++ linux-2.6.39/drivers/md/dm-kcopyd.c @@ -36,7 +36,6 @@ * pages for kcopyd io. *---------------------------------------------------------------*/ struct dm_kcopyd_client { - spinlock_t lock; struct page_list *pages; unsigned int nr_pages; unsigned int nr_free_pages; @@ -99,11 +98,8 @@ static int kcopyd_get_pages(struct dm_kc { struct page_list *pl; - spin_lock(&kc->lock); - if (kc->nr_free_pages < nr) { - spin_unlock(&kc->lock); + if (kc->nr_free_pages < nr) return -ENOMEM; - } kc->nr_free_pages -= nr; for (*pages = pl = kc->pages; --nr; pl = pl->next) @@ -112,8 +108,6 @@ static int kcopyd_get_pages(struct dm_kc kc->pages = pl->next; pl->next = NULL; - spin_unlock(&kc->lock); - return 0; } @@ -121,14 +115,12 @@ static void kcopyd_put_pages(struct dm_k { struct page_list *cursor; - spin_lock(&kc->lock); for (cursor = pl; cursor->next; cursor = cursor->next) kc->nr_free_pages++; kc->nr_free_pages++; cursor->next = kc->pages; kc->pages = pl; - spin_unlock(&kc->lock); } /* @@ -625,7 +617,6 @@ int dm_kcopyd_client_create(unsigned int if (!kc) return -ENOMEM; - spin_lock_init(&kc->lock); spin_lock_init(&kc->job_lock); INIT_LIST_HEAD(&kc->complete_jobs); INIT_LIST_HEAD(&kc->io_jobs);