Improve performance of sys_time(). sys_time() returns time in seconds, but
it does so by calling do_gettimeofday() and then returning the tv_sec
portion of the GTOD time. But the data structure "xtime", which is updated
by every timer/scheduler tick, already offers HZ granularity time.
The patch improves the sysbench OLTP macrobenchmark significantly:
2.6.22-rc6:
#threads
1: transactions: 3733 (373.21 per sec.)
2: transactions: 6676 (667.46 per sec.)
3: transactions: 6957 (695.50 per sec.)
4: transactions: 7055 (705.48 per sec.)
5: transactions: 6596 (659.33 per sec.)
2.6.22-rc6 + sys_time.patch:
1: transactions: 4005 (400.47 per sec.)
2: transactions: 7379 (737.77 per sec.)
3: transactions: 7347 (734.49 per sec.)
4: transactions: 7468 (746.65 per sec.)
5: transactions: 7428 (742.47 per sec.)
Mixed API uses of gettimeofday() and time() are guaranteed to be coherent
via the use of a at-most-once-per-second slowpath that updates xtime.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: build fixes] Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Cc: John Stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>