Re: [PATCH 0/5] Per superblock shrinkers V2

[Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind1@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 2010-05-27 at 13:32 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Tue, 25 May 2010 18:53:03 +1000
> Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> wrote:
> 
> > This series reworks the filesystem shrinkers. We currently have a
> > set of issues with the current filesystem shrinkers:
> > 
> >         1. There is an dependency between dentry and inode cache
> >            shrinking that is only implicitly defined by the order of
> >            shrinker registration.
> >         2. The shrinkers need to walk the superblock list and pin
> >            the superblock to avoid unmount races with the sb going
> >            away.
> >         3. The dentry cache uses per-superblock LRUs and proportions
> >            reclaim between all the superblocks which means we are
> >            doing breadth based reclaim. This means we touch every
> >            superblock for every shrinker call, and may only reclaim
> >            a single dentry at a time from a given superblock.
> >         4. The inode cache has a global LRU, so it has different
> >            reclaim patterns to the dentry cache, despite the fact
> >            that the dentry cache is generally the only thing that
> >            pins inodes in memory.
> >         5. Filesystems need to register their own shrinkers for
> >            caches and can't co-ordinate them with the dentry and
> >            inode cache shrinkers.
> 
> Nice description, but...  it never actually told us what the benefit of
> the changes are.  Presumably some undescribed workload had some
> undescribed user-visible problem.  But what was that workload, and what
> was the user-visible problem, and how does the patch affect all this?

For UBIFS it wwill give a benefit in terms of simpler UBIFS code - we
now have to keep our own list of UBIFS superblocks, provide locking for
it, and maintain. This is just extra burden. So the item 2 above will be
useful for UBIFS.

-- 
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (Артём Битюцкий)

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