libkmod: cache open file for later access
authorLucas De Marchi <lucas.de.marchi@gmail.com>
Thu, 18 Oct 2012 04:36:33 +0000 (01:36 -0300)
committerLucas De Marchi <lucas.de.marchi@gmail.com>
Thu, 18 Oct 2012 05:09:55 +0000 (02:09 -0300)
commit1eff942e37adda55bd8c506d4e2a7970fdbf7a74
tree6613a44c159beb7b9748a32a4dbab182d3c7fee9
parentcc833644b2193d661e4a9c06c047d1a527f3ecf4
libkmod: cache open file for later access

If we are accessing several times the modules and reading some sections
by sucessive calls to the functions below, we are incurring in a penalty
of having to open, parse the header and close the file. For each
function.

- kmod_module_get_info()
- kmod_module_get_versions()
- kmod_module_get_symbols()
- kmod_module_get_dependency_symbols()

These functions are particularly important to depmod. It calls all of
them, for each module. Moreover there's a huge bottleneck in the open
operation if we are using compression. Every time we open the module we
need to uncompress the file and after getting the information we need we
discard the result. This is clearly shown by profiling depmod with perf
(record + report), using compressed modules:

 64.07%  depmod  libz.so.1.2.7       [.] 0x00000000000074b8                                            ◆
 18.18%  depmod  libz.so.1.2.7       [.] crc32                                                         ▒
  2.42%  depmod  libz.so.1.2.7       [.] inflate                                                       ▒
  1.17%  depmod  libc-2.16.so        [.] __memcpy_ssse3_back                                           ▒
  0.96%  depmod  [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] copy_user_generic_string                                      ▒
  0.89%  depmod  libc-2.16.so        [.] __strcmp_sse42                                                ▒
  0.82%  depmod  [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] hrtimer_interrupt                                             ▒
  0.77%  depmod  libc-2.16.so        [.] _int_malloc                                                   ▒
  0.44%  depmod  kmod-nolib          [.] kmod_elf_get_strings                                          ▒
  0.41%  depmod  kmod-nolib          [.] kmod_elf_get_dependency_symbols                               ▒
  0.37%  depmod  kmod-nolib          [.] kmod_elf_get_section                                          ▒
  0.36%  depmod  kmod-nolib          [.] kmod_elf_get_symbols
  ...

Average of running depmod 5 times, dropping caches between them, in a
slow spinning disk:

Before:   12.25 +- 0.20
After:     8.20 +- 0.21
m-i-t:     9.62 +- 0.27

So this patch leads to an improvement of ~33% over unpatched version,
ending up with 15% speedup over module-init-tools.
libkmod/libkmod-file.c
libkmod/libkmod-module.c
libkmod/libkmod-private.h