On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 05:31:02PM +0800, Guo Chao wrote: > This patchset optimizes several places which take the per inode spin lock. > They have not been fully tested yet, thus they are marked as RFC. Inodes are RCU freed. The i_lock spinlock on the i_state field forms part of the memory barrier that allows the RCU read side to correctly detect a freed inode during a RCU protected cache lookup (hash list traversal for the VFS, or a radix tree traversal for XFS). The i_lock usage around the hahs list operations ensures the hash list operations are atomic with state changes so that such changes are correctly detected during RCU-protected traversals... IOWs, removing the i_lock from around the i_state transitions and inode hash insert/remove/traversal operations will cause races in the RCU lookups and result in incorrectly using freed inodes instead of failing the lookup and creating a new one. So I don't think this is a good idea at all... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
