Hi Jan, Amir, Al, Here's my first shot at implementing what we discussed. I tested it using the negative dentry creation tool I mentioned in my previous message, with a similar workflow. Rather than having a bunch of threads accessing the directory to create that "thundering herd" of CPUs in __fsnotify_update_child_dentry_flags, I just started a lot of inotifywait tasks: 1. Create 100 million negative dentries in a dir 2. Use trace-cmd to watch __fsnotify_update_child_dentry_flags: trace-cmd start -p function_graph -l __fsnotify_update_child_dentry_flags sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace_pipe 3. Run a lot of inotifywait tasks: for i in {1..10} inotifywait $dir & done With step #3, I see only one execution of __fsnotify_update_child_dentry_flags. Once that completes, all the inotifywait tasks say "Watches established". Similarly, once an access occurs in the directory, a single __fsnotify_update_child_dentry_flags execution occurs, and all the tasks exit. In short: it works great! However, while testing this, I've observed a dentry still in use warning during unmount of rpc_pipefs on the "nfs" dentry during shutdown. NFS is of course in use, and I assume that fsnotify must have been used to trigger this. The error is not there on mainline without my patch so it's definitely caused by this code. I'll continue debugging it but I wanted to share my first take on this so you could take a look. [ 1595.197339] BUG: Dentry 000000005f5e7197{i=67,n=nfs} still in use (2) [unmount of rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs] Thanks! Stephen Stephen Brennan (2): fsnotify: Protect i_fsnotify_mask and child flags with inode rwsem fsnotify: allow sleepable child flag update fs/notify/fsnotify.c | 84 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------------- fs/notify/mark.c | 55 ++++++++++++++++++++++------- 2 files changed, 103 insertions(+), 36 deletions(-) -- 2.34.1