v2->v3: - Add a faster pruning rate when the free pool is closed to depletion. - As suggested by James Bottomley, add an artificial delay waiting loop before killing a negative dentry and properly clear the DCACHE_KILL_NEGATIVE flag if killing doesn't happen. - Add a new patch to track number of negative dentries that are forcifully killed. v1->v2: - Move the new nr_negative field to the end of dentry_stat_t structure as suggested by Matthew Wilcox. - With the help of Miklos Szeredi, fix incorrect locking order in dentry_kill() by using lock_parent() instead of locking the parent's d_lock directly. - Correctly account for positive to negative dentry transitions. - Automatic pruning of negative dentries will now ignore the reference bit in negative dentries but not the regular shrinking. A rogue application can potentially create a large number of negative dentries in the system consuming most of the memory available. This can impact performance of other applications running on the system. This patchset introduces changes to the dcache subsystem to limit the number of negative dentries allowed to be created thus limiting the amount of memory that can be consumed by negative dentries. Patch 1 tracks the number of negative dentries used and disallow the creation of more when the limit is reached. Patch 2 enables /proc/sys/fs/dentry-state to report the number of negative dentries in the system. Patch 3 enables automatic pruning of negative dentries when it is close to the limit so that we won't end up killing recently used negative dentries. Patch 4 prevents racing between negative dentry pruning and umount operation. Patch 5 shows the number of forced negative dentry killings in /proc/sys/fs/dentry-state. End users can then tune the neg_dentry_pc= kernel boot parameter if they want to reduce forced negative dentry killings. Waiman Long (5): fs/dcache: Limit numbers of negative dentries fs/dcache: Report negative dentry number in dentry-state fs/dcache: Enable automatic pruning of negative dentries fs/dcache: Protect negative dentry pruning from racing with umount fs/dcache: Track count of negative dentries forcibly killed Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt | 7 + fs/dcache.c | 451 ++++++++++++++++++++++-- include/linux/dcache.h | 8 +- include/linux/list_lru.h | 1 + mm/list_lru.c | 4 +- 5 files changed, 435 insertions(+), 36 deletions(-) -- 1.8.3.1