The nr_dentry_negative counter is intended to only account negative dentries that are present on the superblock LRU. Therefore, the LRU add, remove and isolate helpers modify the counter based on whether the dentry is negative, but the shrinker list related helpers do not modify the counter, and the paths that change a dentry between positive and negative only do so if DCACHE_LRU_LIST is set. The problem with this is that a dentry on a shrinker list still has DCACHE_LRU_LIST set to indicate ->d_lru is in use. The additional DCACHE_SHRINK_LIST flag denotes whether the dentry is on LRU or a shrink related list. Therefore if a relevant operation (i.e. unlink) occurs while a dentry is present on a shrinker list, and the associated codepath only checks for DCACHE_LRU_LIST, then it is technically possible to modify the negative dentry count for a dentry that is off the LRU. Since the shrinker list related helpers do not modify the negative dentry count (because non-LRU dentries should not be included in the count) when the dentry is ultimately removed from the shrinker list, this can cause the negative dentry count to become permanently inaccurate. This problem can be reproduced via a heavy file create/unlink vs. drop_caches workload. On an 80xcpu system, I start 80 tasks each running a 1k file create/delete loop, and one task spinning on drop_caches. After 10 minutes or so of runtime, the idle/clean cache negative dentry count increases from somewhere in the range of 5-10 entries to several hundred (and increasingly grows beyond nr_dentry_unused). Tweak the logic in the paths that turn a dentry negative or positive to filter out the case where the dentry is present on a shrink related list. This allows the above workload to maintain an accurate negative dentry count. Signed-off-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@xxxxxxxxxx> --- fs/dcache.c | 5 +++-- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/fs/dcache.c b/fs/dcache.c index 407095188f83..5305b95b3030 100644 --- a/fs/dcache.c +++ b/fs/dcache.c @@ -355,7 +355,7 @@ static inline void __d_clear_type_and_inode(struct dentry *dentry) flags &= ~DCACHE_ENTRY_TYPE; WRITE_ONCE(dentry->d_flags, flags); dentry->d_inode = NULL; - if (flags & DCACHE_LRU_LIST) + if ((flags & (DCACHE_LRU_LIST|DCACHE_SHRINK_LIST)) == DCACHE_LRU_LIST) this_cpu_inc(nr_dentry_negative); } @@ -1846,7 +1846,8 @@ static void __d_instantiate(struct dentry *dentry, struct inode *inode) /* * Decrement negative dentry count if it was in the LRU list. */ - if (dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_LRU_LIST) + if ((dentry->d_flags & + (DCACHE_LRU_LIST|DCACHE_SHRINK_LIST)) == DCACHE_LRU_LIST) this_cpu_dec(nr_dentry_negative); hlist_add_head(&dentry->d_u.d_alias, &inode->i_dentry); raw_write_seqcount_begin(&dentry->d_seq); -- 2.45.0
