[PATCH] r/o bind mounts: track numbers of writers to mounts

This is the real meat of the entire series.  It actually
implements the tracking of the number of writers to a mount.
However, it causes scalability problems because there can be
hundreds of cpus doing open()/close() on files on the same mnt at
the same time.  Even an atomic_t in the mnt has massive scalaing
problems because the cacheline gets so terribly contended.

This uses a statically-allocated percpu variable.  All want/drop
operations are local to a cpu as long that cpu operates on the same
mount, and there are no writer count imbalances.  Writer count
imbalances happen when a write is taken on one cpu, and released
on another, like when an open/close pair is performed on two

Upon a remount,ro request, all of the data from the percpu
variables is collected (expensive, but very rare) and we determine
if there are any outstanding writers to the mount.

I've written a little benchmark to sit in a loop for a couple of
seconds in several cpus in parallel doing open/write/close loops.

http://sr71.net/~dave/linux/openbench.c

The code in here is a a worst-possible case for this patch.  It
does opens on a _pair_ of files in two different mounts in parallel.
This should cause my code to lose its "operate on the same mount"
optimization completely.  This worst-case scenario causes a 3%
degredation in the benchmark.

I could probably get rid of even this 3%, but it would be more
complex than what I have here, and I think this is getting into
acceptable territory.  In practice, I expect writing more than 3
bytes to a file, as well as disk I/O to mask any effects that this
has.

(To get rid of that 3%, we could have an #defined number of mounts
in the percpu variable.  So, instead of a CPU getting operate only
on percpu data when it accesses only one mount, it could stay on
percpu data when it only accesses N or fewer mounts.)

[AV] merged fix for __clear_mnt_mount() stepping on freed vfsmount

Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mount.h b/include/linux/mount.h
index 2eecd2c8c76..8c8e94369ac 100644
--- a/include/linux/mount.h
+++ b/include/linux/mount.h
@@ -14,6 +14,7 @@
 
 #include <linux/types.h>
 #include <linux/list.h>
+#include <linux/nodemask.h>
 #include <linux/spinlock.h>
 #include <asm/atomic.h>
 
@@ -30,6 +31,7 @@ struct mnt_namespace;
 #define MNT_RELATIME	0x20
 
 #define MNT_SHRINKABLE	0x100
+#define MNT_IMBALANCED_WRITE_COUNT	0x200 /* just for debugging */
 
 #define MNT_SHARED	0x1000	/* if the vfsmount is a shared mount */
 #define MNT_UNBINDABLE	0x2000	/* if the vfsmount is a unbindable mount */
@@ -62,6 +64,11 @@ struct vfsmount {
 	int mnt_expiry_mark;		/* true if marked for expiry */
 	int mnt_pinned;
 	int mnt_ghosts;
+	/*
+	 * This value is not stable unless all of the mnt_writers[] spinlocks
+	 * are held, and all mnt_writer[]s on this mount have 0 as their ->count
+	 */
+	atomic_t __mnt_writers;
 };
 
 static inline struct vfsmount *mntget(struct vfsmount *mnt)