Add a special-case when waiting on a pid (via waitpid, waitid, wait4, etc)
to avoid doing an O(n) scan of children and tracees, and instead do an
O(1) lookup. This improves performance when waiting on a pid from a
thread group with many children and/or tracees.
Time to fork and then call waitpid on the child, from a task that already
has N children [1]:
N | Before | After
-----|---------|------
1 | 74 us | 74 us
20 | 72 us | 75 us
100 | 83 us | 77 us
500 | 99 us | 74 us
1000 | 179 us | 75 us
5000 | 804 us | 79 us
8000 | 1268 us | 78 us
[1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/3/12/1567
This can make a substantial performance improvement for applications with
a thread that has many children or tracees and frequently needs to wait on
them. Tools that use ptrace to intercept syscalls for a large number of
processes are likely to fall into this category. In particular this patch
was developed while building a ptrace-based second generation of the
Shadow emulator [2], for which it allows us to avoid quadratic scaling
(without having to use a workaround that introduces a ~40% performance
penalty) [3]. Other examples of tools that fall into this category which
this patch may help include User Mode Linux [4] and DetTrace [5].
[2]: https://shadow.github.io/
[3]: https://github.com/shadow/shadow/issues/1134#issuecomment-798992292
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-mode_Linux
[5]: https://github.com/dettrace/dettrace
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210314231544.9379-1-jnewsome@torproject.org
Signed-off-by: James Newsome <jnewsome@torproject.org>
Reviewed-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Cc: "Eric W . Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
5449162ac0