Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] 9p: Performance improvements for build workloads

[Dominique Martinet <asmadeus@codewreck.org>]

Remi Pommarel wrote on Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 09:17:33PM +0200:
> RFC was mainly here to know if a io_wait_event_killable() would made
> sense before getting the scheduler tree involved. Also as it is my first
> contribution in v9fs (and fs subsystem) wanted to be sure I wasn't
> missing something obvious, caching could be a complex subject to grasp.
> This also comes with some drawbacks, if for example server removes a
> shared file or modify a symlink the client will be desynchronized, so I
> wanted first to be sure we were ok with that when using cache=loose.

Ok!
I think it's completely fine for cache=loose, we're basically telling
the client we're alone in the world.

> I'll try to monitor the new mount API and rebase the series when that
> get merged. I'll probably separate the io_wait_event_killable() in its
> own patchset though.

Thanks, I need to find time to check the v9ses lifetime as I asked about
after a syzcaller bug showed up[1], so it might not be immediate, but
I'll get to it eventually

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/v9fs/aKlg5Ci4WC11GZGz@codewreck.org/T/#u

> > Another thing I tried ages ago was making clunk asynchronous,
> > but that didn't go well;
> > protocol-wise clunk errors are ignored so I figured it was safe enough
> > to just fire it in the background, but it caused some regressions I
> > never had time to look into...
> > 
> > As for reusing fids, I'm not sure it's obvious because of things like
> > locking that basically consider one open file = one fid;
> > I think we're already re-using fids when we can, but I guess it's
> > technically possible to mark a fid as shared and only clone it if an
> > operation that requires an exclusive fid is done...?
> > I'm not sure I want to go down that hole though, sounds like an easy way
> > to mess up and give someone access to data they shouldn't be able to
> > access by sharing a fid opened by another user or something more
> > subtle..
> 
> Yes I gave that a bit more thinking and came up with quite the same
> conclusion, I then gave up on this idea. The asynchronous clunk seems
> interesting though, maybe I'll take a look into that.

It's been a while, but the last time I rebased the patches was around here:
https://github.com/martinetd/linux/commits/9p-async-v2/
(the v1 branch also had clunks async, with this comment
> This has a few problems, but mostly we can't just replace all clunks
> with async ones: depending on the server, explicit close() must clunk
> to make sure the IO is flushed, so these should wait for clunk to finish.
)

If you have time to play with this, happy to consider it again, but
it'll definitely need careful testing (possibly implement the clunk part
as a non-default option? although I'm not sure how that'd fly, linux
doesn't really like options that sacrifice reliability for performance...)

Anyway, that's something I definitely don't have time for short term,
but happy to discuss :)

Cheers,
-- 
Dominique Martinet | Asmadeus