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-rw-r--r--Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt44
1 files changed, 41 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt
index 8789d1810bed..eb59c8b44be9 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt
@@ -316,11 +316,9 @@ The detailed design for rcu-walk is like this:
The cases where rcu-walk cannot continue are:
* NULL dentry (ie. any uncached path element)
-* parent with d_inode->i_op->permission or ACLs
* Following links
-In future patches, permission checks become rcu-walk aware. It may be possible
-eventually to make following links 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.
@@ -336,9 +334,49 @@ or stored into. The result is massive improvements in performance and
scalability of path resolution.
+Interesting statistics
+======================
+
+The following table gives rcu lookup statistics for a few simple workloads
+(2s12c24t Westmere, debian non-graphical system). Ungraceful are attempts to
+drop rcu that fail due to d_seq failure and requiring the entire path lookup
+again. Other cases are successful rcu-drops that are required before the final
+element, nodentry for missing dentry, revalidate for filesystem revalidate
+routine requiring rcu drop, permission for permission check requiring drop,
+and link for symlink traversal requiring drop.
+
+ rcu-lookups restart nodentry link revalidate permission
+bootup 47121 0 4624 1010 10283 7852
+dbench 25386793 0 6778659(26.7%) 55 549 1156
+kbuild 2696672 10 64442(2.3%) 108764(4.0%) 1 1590
+git diff 39605 0 28 2 0 106
+vfstest 24185492 4945 708725(2.9%) 1076136(4.4%) 0 2651
+
+What this shows is that failed rcu-walk lookups, ie. ones that are restarted
+entirely with ref-walk, are quite rare. Even the "vfstest" case which
+specifically has concurrent renames/mkdir/rmdir/ creat/unlink/etc to excercise
+such races is not showing a huge amount of restarts.
+
+Dropping from rcu-walk to ref-walk mean that we have encountered a dentry where
+the reference count needs to be taken for some reason. This is either because
+we have reached the target of the path walk, or because we have encountered a
+condition that can't be resolved in rcu-walk mode. Ideally, we drop rcu-walk
+only when we have reached the target dentry, so the other statistics show where
+this does not happen.
+
+Note that a graceful drop from rcu-walk mode due to something such as the
+dentry not existing (which can be common) is not necessarily a failure of
+rcu-walk scheme, because some elements of the path may have been walked in
+rcu-walk mode. The further we get from common path elements (such as cwd or
+root), the less contended the dentry is likely to be. The closer we are to
+common path elements, the more likely they will exist in dentry cache.
+
+
Papers and other documentation on dcache locking
================================================
1. Scaling dcache with RCU (http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7124).
2. http://lse.sourceforge.net/locking/dcache/dcache.html
+
+