On 7/3/24 7:13 AM, Brian Foster wrote:
> 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.
>
> Fixes: af0c9af1b3f6 ("fs/dcache: Track & report number of negative dentries")
> Signed-off-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Acked-by: Ian Kent <ikent@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>
> Hi Christian,
>
> I see you already picked up v1. Josef had asked for some comment updates
> so I'm posting v2 with that, but TBH I'm not sure how useful this all is
> once one groks the flags. I have no strong opinion on it. I also added a
> Fixes: tag for the patch that added the counter.
>
> In short, feel free to grab this one, ignore this and stick with v1, or
> maybe just pull in the Fixes: tag if you agree with it. Thanks.
This might also want a:
Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # v5.0+
just FWIW. Given the mild panic On The Internet about negative dentries, an
artificial and permanent increase in the counter is probably adding to the
worries.
Thanks,
-Eric
