udev performance

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 05:40:27PM +0200, Harald Hoyer wrote:
> >A while back I did some experiments with systemtap and found that 
> >modprobe was doing a linear search through modules.deps:
> >
> >http://sourceware.org/ml/systemtap/2007-q1/msg00140.html
> >
> >I wrote a script that would prepend the modules that are actually used 
> >to the beginning of modules.dep to reduce the average length of search. 
> >This reduced the amount of data read (and time spent waiting for I/O) 
> >and slightly reduced the time to boot the machine. Bootchart samples 
> >process state periodically. Below is some of the data extracted from the 
> >bootchart samples:
> >
> >                all states    D state
> >                    modprobe        modprobe
> >                    samples     samples
> >normal    modules.dep    120            73
> >reordered modules.deps    63            27
> >
> >Having to linearly through 250K of text in modules.dep each time a 
> >module is loaded doesn't seem very efficient.
> >
> >
> >-Will
> >
> 
> Problem is, that most of the modprobes with a modalias are not existent and 
> so every line is parsed.

If modules.dep searching really takes significant time, then there is always
an option to precompile it into a more efficient format, e.g. more compact,
with a hash table or whatever best matches modprobe's use.

	Jakub