The problem that this patch aims to fix is vfsmount refcounting scalability.
We need to take a reference on the vfsmount for every successful path lookup,
which often go to the same mount point.
The fundamental difficulty is that a "simple" reference count can never be made
scalable, because any time a reference is dropped, we must check whether that
was the last reference. To do that requires communication with all other CPUs
that may have taken a reference count.
We can make refcounts more scalable in a couple of ways, involving keeping
distributed counters, and checking for the global-zero condition less
frequently.
- check the global sum once every interval (this will delay zero detection
for some interval, so it's probably a showstopper for vfsmounts).
- keep a local count and only taking the global sum when local reaches 0 (this
is difficult for vfsmounts, because we can't hold preempt off for the life of
a reference, so a counter would need to be per-thread or tied strongly to a
particular CPU which requires more locking).
- keep a local difference of increments and decrements, which allows us to sum
the total difference and hence find the refcount when summing all CPUs. Then,
keep a single integer "long" refcount for slow and long lasting references,
and only take the global sum of local counters when the long refcount is 0.
This last scheme is what I implemented here. Attached mounts and process root
and working directory references are "long" references, and everything else is
a short reference.
This allows scalable vfsmount references during path walking over mounted
subtrees and unattached (lazy umounted) mounts with processes still running
in them.
This results in one fewer atomic op in the fastpath: mntget is now just a
per-CPU inc, rather than an atomic inc; and mntput just requires a spinlock
and non-atomic decrement in the common case. However code is otherwise bigger
and heavier, so single threaded performance is basically a wash.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
Use a seqlock in the fs_struct to enable us to take an atomic copy of the
complete cwd and root paths. Use this in the RCU lookup path to avoid a
thread-shared spinlock in RCU lookup operations.
Multi-threaded apps may now perform path lookups with scalability matching
multi-process apps. Operations such as stat(2) become very scalable for
multi-threaded workload.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
fs: fs_struct rwlock to spinlock
struct fs_struct.lock is an rwlock with the read-side used to protect root and
pwd members while taking references to them. Taking a reference to a path
typically requires just 2 atomic ops, so the critical section is very small.
Parallel read-side operations would have cacheline contention on the lock, the
dentry, and the vfsmount cachelines, so the rwlock is unlikely to ever give a
real parallelism increase.
Replace it with a spinlock to avoid one or two atomic operations in typical
path lookup fastpath.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Add three helpers that retrieve a refcounted copy of the root and cwd
from the supplied fs_struct.
get_fs_root()
get_fs_pwd()
get_fs_root_and_pwd()
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Don't pull it in sched.h; very few files actually need it and those
can include directly. sched.h itself only needs forward declaration
of struct fs_struct;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
* all changes of current->fs are done under task_lock and write_lock of
old fs->lock
* refcount is not atomic anymore (same protection)
* its decrements are done when removing reference from current; at the
same time we decide whether to free it.
* put_fs_struct() is gone
* new field - ->in_exec. Set by check_unsafe_exec() if we are trying to do
execve() and only subthreads share fs_struct. Cleared when finishing exec
(success and failure alike). Makes CLONE_FS fail with -EAGAIN if set.
* check_unsafe_exec() may fail with -EAGAIN if another execve() from subthread
is in progress.
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Pure code move; two new helper functions for nfsd and daemonize
(unshare_fs_struct() and daemonize_fs_struct() resp.; for now -
the same code as used to be in callers). unshare_fs_struct()
exported (for nfsd, as copy_fs_struct()/exit_fs() used to be),
copy_fs_struct() and exit_fs() don't need exports anymore.
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Nick Piggin