Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 7:01 AM Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Fundamentally proc_flush_task is an optimization. Just getting rid of
>> dentries earlier. At least at one point it was an important
>> optimization because the old process dentries would just sit around
>> doing nothing for anyone.
>
> I'm pretty sure it's still important. It's very easy to generate a
> _ton_ of dentries with /proc.
>
>> I wonder if instead of invalidating specific dentries we could instead
>> fire wake up a shrinker and point it at one or more instances of proc.
>
> It shouldn't be the dentries themselves that are a freeing problem.
> They're being RCU-free'd anyway because of lookup. It's the
> proc_mounts list that is the problem, isn't it?
>
> So it's just fs_info that needs to be rcu-delayed because it contains
> that list. Or is there something else?
The fundamental dcache thing we are playing with is:
dentry = d_hash_and_lookup(proc_root, &name);
if (dentry) {
d_invalidate(dentry);
dput(dentry);
}
As Al pointed out upthread dput and d_invalidate can both sleep.
The dput can potentially go away if we use __d_lookup_rcu instead of
d_lookup.
The challenge is d_invalidate.
It has the fundamentally sleeping detach_mounts loop. Even
shrink_dcache_parent has a cond_sched() in there to ensure it doesn't
live lock the system.
We could and arguabley should set DCACHE_CANT_MOUNT on the proc pid
dentries. Which will prevent having to deal with mounts.
But I don't see an easy way of getting shrink_dcache_parent to run
without sleeping. Ideas?
Eric
