Re: [PATCH v6 0/7] fs/dcache: Track & limit # of negative dentries

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Fri 06-07-18 15:32:45, Waiman Long wrote:
[...]
> A rogue application can potentially create a large number of negative
> dentries in the system consuming most of the memory available if it
> is not under the direct control of a memory controller that enforce
> kernel memory limit.

How does this differ from other untracked allocations for untrusted
tasks in general? E.g. nothing really prevents a task to create a long
chain of unreclaimable dentries and even go to OOM potentially. Negative
dentries should be easily reclaimable on the other hand. So why does the
later needs a special treatment while the first one is ok? There are
quite some resources which allow a non privileged user to consume a lot
of memory and the memory controller is the only reliable way to mitigate
the risk.

> This patchset introduces changes to the dcache subsystem to track and
> optionally limit the number of negative dentries allowed to be created by
> background pruning of excess negative dentries or even kill it after use.
> This capability will help to limit the amount of memory that can be
> consumed by negative dentries.

How are you going to balance that between workload? What prevents a
rogue application to simply consume the limit and force all others in
the system to go slow path?

> Patch 1 tracks the number of negative dentries present in the LRU
> lists and reports it in /proc/sys/fs/dentry-state.

If anything I _think_ vmstat would benefit from this because behavior of
the memory reclaim does depend on the amount of neg. dentries.

> Patch 2 adds a "neg-dentry-pc" sysctl parameter that can be used to to
> specify a soft limit on the number of negative allowed as a percentage
> of total system memory. This parameter is 0 by default which means no
> negative dentry limiting will be performed.

percentage has turned out to be a really wrong unit for many tunables
over time. Even 1% can be just too much on really large machines.

> Patch 3 enables automatic pruning of least recently used negative
> dentries when the total number is close to the preset limit.

Please explain why this cannot be done in a standard dcache shrinking
way. I strongly suspect that you are developing yet another reclaim with
its own sets of tunable and bypassing the existing infrastructure. I
haven't read patches yet but the cover letter doesn't really explain
design much so I am only guessing.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
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