When notification starts/stops listening events from inode's children it has to update dentry->d_flags of all positive child dentries. Scanning may take a long time if the directory has a lot of negative child dentries. Use the new tail negative flag to detect when the remainder of the children are negative, and skip them. This speeds up fsnotify/inotify watch creation, and in some extreme cases can avoid a soft lockup, for example, with 200 million negative dentries in a single directory: watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#20 stuck for 9s! [inotifywait:9528] CPU: 20 PID: 9528 Comm: inotifywait Kdump: loaded Not tainted 5.16.0-rc4.20211208.el8uek.rc1.x86_64 #1 Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996), BIOS 1.4.1 12/03/2020 RIP: 0010:__fsnotify_update_child_dentry_flags+0xad/0x120 Call Trace: <TASK> fsnotify_add_mark_locked+0x113/0x160 inotify_new_watch+0x130/0x190 inotify_update_watch+0x11a/0x140 __x64_sys_inotify_add_watch+0xef/0x140 do_syscall_64+0x3b/0x90 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xae Co-authored-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Co-authored-by: Gautham Ananthakrishna <gautham.ananthakrishna@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Stephen Brennan <stephen.s.brennan@xxxxxxxxxx> --- fs/notify/fsnotify.c | 6 +++++- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/fs/notify/fsnotify.c b/fs/notify/fsnotify.c index ab81a0776ece..1f314f85f4c1 100644 --- a/fs/notify/fsnotify.c +++ b/fs/notify/fsnotify.c @@ -127,8 +127,12 @@ void __fsnotify_update_child_dentry_flags(struct inode *inode) * original inode) */ spin_lock(&alias->d_lock); list_for_each_entry(child, &alias->d_subdirs, d_child) { - if (!child->d_inode) + if (!child->d_inode) { + /* all remaining children are negative */ + if (d_is_tail_negative(child)) + break; continue; + } spin_lock_nested(&child->d_lock, DENTRY_D_LOCK_NESTED); if (watched) -- 2.30.2