On Tuesday October 31, [email protected] wrote:
> Neil Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > When we unmount a filesystem we need to release all dentries.
> > We currently
> > - move a collection of dentries to the end of the dentry_unused list
> > - call prune_dcache to prune that number of dentries.
>
> This is not true anymore.
True. That should read:
When we remount a filesystem or invalidate a block device which has a
mounted filesystem we call shrink dcache_sb which currently:
- moves a collection of dentries to the end of the dentry_unused list
- calls prune_dcache to prune that number of dentries.
but the patch is still valid.
Any objections to it going in to -mm and maybe .20 ??
Thanks,
NeilBrown
Hello Neil,
Neil Brown wrote:
> On Tuesday October 31, [email protected] wrote:
>> Neil Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> When we unmount a filesystem we need to release all dentries.
>>> We currently
>>> - move a collection of dentries to the end of the dentry_unused list
>>> - call prune_dcache to prune that number of dentries.
>> This is not true anymore.
>
> True. That should read:
>
> When we remount a filesystem or invalidate a block device which has a
> mounted filesystem we call shrink dcache_sb which currently:
> - moves a collection of dentries to the end of the dentry_unused list
> - calls prune_dcache to prune that number of dentries.
>
> but the patch is still valid.
>
> Any objections to it going in to -mm and maybe .20 ??
Currently we have 3 type of functions that works with dentry_unused list:
1) prune_dcache(NULL) -- called from shrink_dcache_memory, frees the memory and
requires global LRU. works well in current implementation.
2) prune_dcache(sb) -- called from shrink_dcache_parent(), frees subtree, LRU
is not need here. Current implementation uses global LRU for these purposes, it
is ineffective, and patch from Neil Brown fixes this issue.
3) shrink_dcache_sb() -- called when we need to free the unused dentries for
given super block. Current implementation is not effective too, and per-sb LRU
would be the best solution here. On the other hand patch from Neil Brown is much
better than current implementation.
In general I think that we should approve Neil Brown's patch. We (I and Kirill
Korotaev) are ready to acknowledge it when the following remarks fill be fixed:
- it seems for me list_splice() is not required inside prune_dcache(),
- DCACHE_REFERENCED dentries should not be removed from private list to
dentry_unused list, this flag should be ignored if the private list is used,
- count argument should be ignored in this case too, we want to free all the
dentries in private list,
- when we shrink the whole super block we should free per-sb anonymous dentries
too (please see Kirill Korotaev's letter)
Then I'm going to prepare new patch that will enhance the shrink_dcache_sb()
performance:
- we can add new list head into struct superblock and use it in
shrink_dcache_sb() instead of temporal private list. We will check is it empty
in dput() and add the new unused dentries to per-sb list instead of
dentry_unused list.
thank you,
Vasily Averin
SWsoft Virtuozzo/OpenVZ Linux kernel team