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Feng Tang 911ac7979d Documentation: Add document for false sharing
When doing performance tuning or debugging performance regressions,
more and more cases are found to be related to false sharing [1][2][3],
and the situation can be worse for newer platforms with hundreds of
CPUs. There are already many commits in current kernel specially
for mitigating the performance degradation due to false sharing.

False sharing could harm the performance silently without being
noticed, due to reasons like:
* data members of a big data structure randomly sitting together
  in one cache line
* global data of small size are linked compactly together

So it's better to make a simple document about the normal pattern
of false sharing, basic ways to mitigate it and call out to
developers to pay attention during code-writing.

[ Many thanks to Dave Hansen, Ying Huang, Tim Chen, Julie Du and
  Yu Chen for their contributions ]

[1]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220619150456.GB34471@xsang-OptiPlex-9020/
[2]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20201102091543.GM31092@shao2-debian/
[3]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230307125538.818862491@linutronix.de/

Signed-off-by: Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230407041235.37886-1-feng.tang@intel.com
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
2023-04-10 16:46:11 -06:00
Documentation Documentation: Add document for false sharing 2023-04-10 16:46:11 -06:00
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README Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/ 2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00

README

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.