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Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/6] kernfs: proposed locking and concurrency
 improvement
From:   Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net>
To:     Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>,
        Rick Lindsley <ricklind@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc:     Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
        David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>,
        Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>,
        linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Date:   Sun, 21 Jun 2020 12:55:33 +0800
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On Fri, 2020-06-19 at 18:23 -0400, Tejun Heo wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 01:41:39PM -0700, Rick Lindsley wrote:
> > On 6/19/20 8:38 AM, Tejun Heo wrote:
> > 
> > > I don't have strong objections to the series but the rationales
> > > don't seem
> > > particularly strong. It's solving a suspected problem but only
> > > half way. It
> > > isn't clear whether this can be the long term solution for the
> > > problem
> > > machine and whether it will benefit anyone else in a meaningful
> > > way either.
> > 
> > I don't understand your statement about solving the problem
> > halfway. Could
> > you elaborate?
> 
> Spending 5 minutes during boot creating sysfs objects doesn't seem
> like a
> particularly good solution and I don't know whether anyone else would
> experience similar issues. Again, not necessarily against improving
> the
> scalability of kernfs code but the use case seems a bit out there.
> 
> > > I think Greg already asked this but how are the 100,000+ memory
> > > objects
> > > used? Is that justified in the first place?
> > 
> > They are used for hotplugging and partitioning memory. The size of
> > the
> > segments (and thus the number of them) is dictated by the
> > underlying
> > hardware.
> 
> This sounds so bad. There gotta be a better interface for that,
> right?

I'm still struggling a bit to grasp what your getting at but ...

Maybe your talking about the underlying notifications system where
a notification is sent for every event.

There's nothing new about that problem and it's becoming increasingly
clear that existing kernel notification sub-systems don't scale well.

Mount handling is a current example which is one of the areas David
Howells is trying to improve and that's taken years now to get as
far as it has.

It seems to me that any improvements in the area here would have a
different solution, perhaps something along the lines of multiple
notification merging, increased context carried in notifications,
or the like. Something like the notification merging to reduce
notification volume might eventually be useful for David's
notifications sub-system too (and, I think the design of that
sub-system could probably accommodate that sort of change away
from the problematic anonymous notification sub-systems we have
now).

But it's taken a long time to get that far with that project and
the case here would have a far more significant impact on a fairly
large number of sub-systems, both kernel and user space, so all I
can hope for with this discussion is to raise awareness of the need
so that it's recognised and thought about approaches to improving
it can happen.

So, while the questions you ask are valid and your concerns real,
it's unrealistic to think there's a simple solution that can be
implemented in short order. Problem awareness is all that can be done
now so that fundamental and probably wide spread improvements might
be able to be implemented over time.

But if I misunderstand your thinking on this please elaborate further.

Ian