I am currently tracking a hotlock reported by a customer on a large, 512 cores,
system, I am currently running 3.6.0 rc1 but the issue looks like it has been
this way for a very long time.
The offending lock is proc_dir_entry->pde_unload_lock.  

In proc_reg_release we are doing a kfree under the spinlock which is ok but it
means we are holding the lock longer then required. Scaling improved when I 
moved kfree out.

Also shouldn't the comment on pde_unload_lock also note that pde_openers and 
pde_unload_completion are both used under the lock?

Here is some data from quick test program which just reads from /proc/cpuinfo.
Lower is better, as you can see the worst case scenario is improved.
        baseline        moved kfree     
tasks   read-sec        read-sec        
1       0.0141          0.0141
2       0.0140          0.0140
4       0.0140          0.0141
8       0.0145          0.0145
16      0.0553          0.0548
32      0.1688          0.1622
64      0.5017          0.3856
128     1.7005          0.9710
256     5.2513          2.6519
512     8.0529          6.2976

If the patch looks agreeable I will resend it properly.
 
diff --git a/fs/proc/inode.c b/fs/proc/inode.c
index 7ac817b..46016c1 100644
--- a/fs/proc/inode.c
+++ b/fs/proc/inode.c
@@ -403,9 +403,11 @@ static int proc_reg_release(struct inode *inode, struct 
file *file)
        release = pde->proc_fops->release;
        if (pdeo) {
                list_del(&pdeo->lh);
-               kfree(pdeo);
        }
        spin_unlock(&pde->pde_unload_lock);
+       if (pdeo) {
+               kfree(pdeo);
+       }
 
        if (release)
                rv = release(inode, file);

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