ext2fs kernel profiling: most of the time in thread management

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

I've done some stat-based kernel profiling (I'll have to post how to do
it on the wiki sometime) on ext2fs doing nothing more than

while true; do rm -f blop ; \cp -f blip blop ; done

(the file is 2MiB)
The results are:

thread_will_wait: 11.700000%
thread_go: 10.650000%
thread_wakeup_prim: 10.250000%
assert_wait: 10.000000%
thread_block: 9.650000%
thread_continue: 8.900000%
thread_invoke: 6.550000%
vm_map_lookup_entry: 2.900000%
ldt_init: 2.250000%
pmap_page_protect: 1.750000%
thread_handoff: 1.600000%
pmap_copy_page: 1.300000%
vm_object_deactivate_pages: 1.150000%
__mach_msg: 0.800000%
hurd_thread_self: 0.700000%
vm_map_enter: 0.650000%
vm_page_deactivate: 0.550000%
ipc_kmsg_copyin_body: 0.550000%
zalloc: 0.500000%

It might be biaised by the clock not being able to tick everywhere in
the kernel (though I guess e.g. most of the IPC machinery is running at
ipl0?), but I believe it's still a bit revealing: I had already noticed
that ext2fs spends most of its time in the kernel (like 90%), and it
here seems we're spending a lot of time just managing the ext2fs thread
sleeps (no, there aren't many threads in that test, just two dozen).

Samuel