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Nick Piggin authored
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...
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