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  1. Mar 31, 2011
  2. Jan 06, 2011
    • Nick Piggin's avatar
      fs: provide rcu-walk aware permission i_ops · b74c79e9
      Nick Piggin authored
      
      Signed-off-by: default avatarNick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
      b74c79e9
    • Nick Piggin's avatar
      fs: rcu-walk aware d_revalidate method · 34286d66
      Nick Piggin authored
      
      Require filesystems be aware of .d_revalidate being called in rcu-walk
      mode (nd->flags & LOOKUP_RCU). For now do a simple push down, returning
      -ECHILD from all implementations.
      
      Signed-off-by: default avatarNick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
      34286d66
    • Nick Piggin's avatar
      fs: rcu-walk for path lookup · 31e6b01f
      Nick Piggin authored
      
      Perform common cases of path lookups without any stores or locking in the
      ancestor dentry elements. This is called rcu-walk, as opposed to the current
      algorithm which is a refcount based walk, or ref-walk.
      
      This results in far fewer atomic operations on every path element,
      significantly improving path lookup performance. It also avoids cacheline
      bouncing on common dentries, significantly improving scalability.
      
      The overall design is like this:
      * LOOKUP_RCU is set in nd->flags, which distinguishes rcu-walk from ref-walk.
      * Take the RCU lock for the entire path walk, starting with the acquiring
        of the starting path (eg. root/cwd/fd-path). So now dentry refcounts are
        not required for dentry persistence.
      * synchronize_rcu is called when unregistering a filesystem, so we can
        access d_ops and i_ops during rcu-walk.
      * Similarly take the vfsmount lock for the entire path walk. So now mnt
        refcounts are not required for persistence. Also we are free to perform mount
        lookups, and to assume dentry mount points and mount roots are stable up and
        down the path.
      * Have a per-dentry seqlock to protect the dentry name, parent, and inode,
        so we can load this tuple atomically, and also check whether any of its
        members have changed.
      * Dentry lookups (based on parent, candidate string tuple) recheck the parent
        sequence after the child is found in case anything changed in the parent
        during the path walk.
      * inode is also RCU protected so we can load d_inode and use the inode for
        limited things.
      * i_mode, i_uid, i_gid can be tested for exec permissions during path walk.
      * i_op can be loaded.
      
      When we reach the destination dentry, we lock it, recheck lookup sequence,
      and increment its refcount and mountpoint refcount. RCU and vfsmount locks
      are dropped. This is termed "dropping rcu-walk". If the dentry refcount does
      not match, we can not drop rcu-walk gracefully at the current point in the
      lokup, so instead return -ECHILD (for want of a better errno). This signals the
      path walking code to re-do the entire lookup with a ref-walk.
      
      Aside from the final dentry, there are other situations that may be encounted
      where we cannot continue rcu-walk. In that case, we drop rcu-walk (ie. take
      a reference on the last good dentry) and continue with a ref-walk. Again, if
      we can drop rcu-walk gracefully, we return -ECHILD and do the whole lookup
      using ref-walk. But it is very important that we can continue with ref-walk
      for most cases, particularly to avoid the overhead of double lookups, and to
      gain the scalability advantages on common path elements (like cwd and root).
      
      The cases where rcu-walk cannot continue are:
      * NULL dentry (ie. any uncached path element)
      * parent with d_inode->i_op->permission or ACLs
      * dentries with d_revalidate
      * Following links
      
      In future patches, permission checks and d_revalidate become 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.
      
      Signed-off-by: default avatarNick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
      31e6b01f
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