On Thu, Mar 05, 2015 at 04:21:21PM +1100, NeilBrown wrote:
> Hi Al (and others),
>
> I wonder if you could look over this patchset.
> It allows RCU-walk to follow symlinks in many common cases,
> thus removing a surprising performance hit caused by using symlinks.
>
> The last could of patches make changes to XFS and NFS to support
> this but I haven't forwarded to the relevant lists yet.
> If/when the early code meets with approval I'll do that.
>
> The first patch almost certainly needs to be changed. I originally
> wrote this code when filesystems could see inside nameidata.
> It is now opaque so the simplest solution was to provide an
> accessor function.
> Maybe I should as a 'flags' arg to ->follow_link?? Or have
> ->follow_link and ->follow_link_rcu ??
> What do you suggest?
Umm... Some observations:
* now ->follow_link() can be called in RCU mode, which means
that it can race with fs shutdown; not a problem, except that now it
joins ->lookup() et.al. in "if some data structure is needed in RCU
case of that, make sure it's not destroyed without an RCU delay somewhere
between the entry into ->kill_sb() and destruction.
* highmem pages in symlinks: that BS shouldn't be allowed at
all. Just make sure that at least for those filesystems symlink inodes
get mapping_set_gfp_mask(&inode->i_data, GFP_KERNEL) and be done with that.
* are you sure that security_inode_follow_link() is OK to call in
RCU mode?
* what warranties are you giving for the lifetime of strings
passed to nd_set_link()? Right now it's "should not be freed until the
matching ->put_link()"; what happens for RCU mode?
* really nasty one: creat(2) on a dangling symlink. What's to
preserve the last component if you get into that symlink in RCU mode?
TBH, I'm less than fond of passing nameidata to ->follow_link() at all,
flags or no flags. We could kill current->link_count and
current->total_link_count, replacing them with one void * current->nameidata
and taking counters into struct nameidata itself. Have places like e.g.
kern_path_locked() do
struct nameidata nd, *saved = set_nameidata(&nd);
...
set_nameidata(saved);
with set_nameidata(p) doing this:
old = current->nameidata;
current->nameidata = p;
if (p) {
if (!old) {
p->link_count = 0;
p->total_link_count = 0;
} else {
p->link_count = old->link_count;
p->total_link_count = old->total_link_count;
}
}
return old;
Then nd_set_link() et.al. would use current->nameidata instead of an
explicitly passed pointer and ->follow_link() instances wouldn't need
that opaque pointer passed to them at all.
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