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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt | 44 |
1 files changed, 41 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt index 8789d1810be..eb59c8b44be 100644 --- a/Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt +++ b/Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt @@ -316,11 +316,9 @@ The detailed design for rcu-walk is like this: The cases where rcu-walk cannot continue are: * NULL dentry (ie. any uncached path element) -* parent with d_inode->i_op->permission or ACLs * Following links -In future patches, permission checks become rcu-walk aware. It may be possible -eventually to make following links rcu-walk aware. +It may be possible eventually to make following links rcu-walk aware. Uncached path elements will always require dropping to ref-walk mode, at the very least because i_mutex needs to be grabbed, and objects allocated. @@ -336,9 +334,49 @@ or stored into. The result is massive improvements in performance and scalability of path resolution. +Interesting statistics +====================== + +The following table gives rcu lookup statistics for a few simple workloads +(2s12c24t Westmere, debian non-graphical system). Ungraceful are attempts to +drop rcu that fail due to d_seq failure and requiring the entire path lookup +again. Other cases are successful rcu-drops that are required before the final +element, nodentry for missing dentry, revalidate for filesystem revalidate +routine requiring rcu drop, permission for permission check requiring drop, +and link for symlink traversal requiring drop. + + rcu-lookups restart nodentry link revalidate permission +bootup 47121 0 4624 1010 10283 7852 +dbench 25386793 0 6778659(26.7%) 55 549 1156 +kbuild 2696672 10 64442(2.3%) 108764(4.0%) 1 1590 +git diff 39605 0 28 2 0 106 +vfstest 24185492 4945 708725(2.9%) 1076136(4.4%) 0 2651 + +What this shows is that failed rcu-walk lookups, ie. ones that are restarted +entirely with ref-walk, are quite rare. Even the "vfstest" case which +specifically has concurrent renames/mkdir/rmdir/ creat/unlink/etc to excercise +such races is not showing a huge amount of restarts. + +Dropping from rcu-walk to ref-walk mean that we have encountered a dentry where +the reference count needs to be taken for some reason. This is either because +we have reached the target of the path walk, or because we have encountered a +condition that can't be resolved in rcu-walk mode. Ideally, we drop rcu-walk +only when we have reached the target dentry, so the other statistics show where +this does not happen. + +Note that a graceful drop from rcu-walk mode due to something such as the +dentry not existing (which can be common) is not necessarily a failure of +rcu-walk scheme, because some elements of the path may have been walked in +rcu-walk mode. The further we get from common path elements (such as cwd or +root), the less contended the dentry is likely to be. The closer we are to +common path elements, the more likely they will exist in dentry cache. + + Papers and other documentation on dcache locking ================================================ 1. Scaling dcache with RCU (http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7124). 2. http://lse.sourceforge.net/locking/dcache/dcache.html + + |