On Tue, 2021-07-27 at 12:02 +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: > On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 05:28:13PM +0800, Ian Kent wrote: > > There have been a few instances of contention on the kernfs_mutex > > during > > path walks, a case on very large IBM systems seen by myself, a > > report by > > Brice Goglin and followed up by Fox Chen, and I've since seen a > > couple > > of other reports by CoreOS users. > > > > The common thread is a large number of kernfs path walks leading to > > slowness of path walks due to kernfs_mutex contention. > > > > The problem being that changes to the VFS over some time have > > increased > > it's concurrency capabilities to an extent that kernfs's use of a > > mutex > > is no longer appropriate. There's also an issue of walks for non- > > existent > > paths causing contention if there are quite a few of them which is > > a less > > common problem. > > > > This patch series is relatively straight forward. > > > > All it does is add the ability to take advantage of VFS negative > > dentry > > caching to avoid needless dentry alloc/free cycles for lookups of > > paths > > that don't exit and change the kernfs_mutex to a read/write > > semaphore. > > > > The patch that tried to stay in VFS rcu-walk mode during path walks > > has > > been dropped for two reasons. First, it doesn't actually give very > > much > > improvement and, second, if there's a place where mistakes could go > > unnoticed it would be in that path. This makes the patch series > > simpler > > to review and reduces the likelihood of problems going unnoticed > > and > > popping up later. > > > > Changes since v7: > > - remove extra tab in helper kernfs_dir_changed. > > - fix thinko adding an unnecessary kernfs_inc_rev() in > > kernfs_rename_ns(). > > Thanks for sticking with this, I've applied this to my testing branch > and let's see how 0-day does with it :) That's great news Greg, and thanks for putting up with me too, ;) Ian
