The pid_revalidate() function drops from RCU into REF lookup mode. When many threads are resolving paths within /proc in parallel, this can result in heavy spinlock contention on d_lockref as each thread tries to grab a reference to the /proc dentry (and drop it shortly thereafter). Investigation indicates that it is not necessary to drop RCU in pid_revalidate(), as no RCU data is modified and the function never sleeps. So, remove the LOOKUP_RCU check. Signed-off-by: Stephen Brennan <stephen.s.brennan@xxxxxxxxxx> --- When running running ~100 parallel instances of "TZ=/etc/localtime ps -fe >/dev/null" on a 100CPU machine, the %sys utilization reaches 90%, and perf shows the following code path as being responsible for heavy contention on the d_lockref spinlock: walk_component() lookup_fast() d_revalidate() pid_revalidate() // returns -ECHILD unlazy_child() lockref_get_not_dead(&nd->path.dentry->d_lockref) <-- contention By applying this patch, %sys utilization falls to around 60% under the same workload. Although this particular workload is a bit contrived, we have seen some monitoring scripts which produced similarly high %sys time due to this contention. Changes in v4: - Simplify by unconditionally calling pid_update_inode() from pid_revalidate, and removing the LOOKUP_RCU check. Changes in v3: - Rather than call pid_update_inode() with flags, create proc_inode_needs_update() to determine whether the call can be skipped. - Restore the call to the security hook (see next patch). Changes in v2: - Remove get_pid_task_rcu_user() and get_proc_task_rcu(), since they were unnecessary. - Remove the call to security_task_to_inode(). fs/proc/base.c | 15 +++++++-------- 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-) diff --git a/fs/proc/base.c b/fs/proc/base.c index f52217f432bc..633ef74e8dfd 100644 --- a/fs/proc/base.c +++ b/fs/proc/base.c @@ -1974,19 +1974,18 @@ static int pid_revalidate(struct dentry *dentry, unsigned int flags) { struct inode *inode; struct task_struct *task; + int ret = 0; - if (flags & LOOKUP_RCU) - return -ECHILD; - - inode = d_inode(dentry); - task = get_proc_task(inode); + rcu_read_lock(); + inode = d_inode_rcu(dentry); + task = pid_task(proc_pid(inode), PIDTYPE_PID); if (task) { pid_update_inode(task, inode); - put_task_struct(task); - return 1; + ret = 1; } - return 0; + rcu_read_unlock(); + return ret; } static inline bool proc_inode_is_dead(struct inode *inode) -- 2.25.1