Re: [RFC PATCH v3 1/8] Use refcount_t for ucounts reference counting

Alexey Gladkov
2021-01-21T16:08:09Z

On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 09:50:34AM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> >> The current ucount code does check for overflow and fails the increment
> >> in every case.
> >>
> >> So arguably it will be a regression and inferior error handling behavior
> >> if the code switches to the ``better'' refcount_t data structure.
> >>
> >> I originally didn't use refcount_t because silently saturating and not
> >> bothering to handle the error makes me uncomfortable.
> >>
> >> Not having to acquire the ucounts_lock every time seems nice. Perhaps
> >> the path forward would be to start with stupid/correct code that always
> >> takes the ucounts_lock for every increment of ucounts->count, that is
> >> later replaced with something more optimal.
> >>
> >> Not impacting performance in the non-namespace cases and having good
> >> performance in the other cases is a fundamental requirement of merging
> >> code like this.
> >
> > Did I understand your suggestion correctly that you suggest to use
> > spin_lock for atomic_read and atomic_inc ?
> >
> > If so, then we are already incrementing the counter under ucounts_lock.
> >
> > ...
> > if (atomic_read(&ucounts->count) == INT_MAX)
> > ucounts = NULL;
> > else
> > atomic_inc(&ucounts->count);
> > spin_unlock_irq(&ucounts_lock);
> > return ucounts;
> >
> > something like this ?
>
> Yes. But without atomics. Something a bit more like:
> > ...
> > if (ucounts->count == INT_MAX)
> > ucounts = NULL;
> > else
> > ucounts->count++;
> > spin_unlock_irq(&ucounts_lock);
> > return ucounts;

This is the original code.

> I do believe at some point we will want to say using the spin_lock for
> ucounts->count is cumbersome, and suboptimal and we want to change it to
> get a better performing implementation.
>
> Just for getting the semantics correct we should be able to use just
> ucounts_lock for locking. Then when everything is working we can
> profile and optimize the code.
>
> I just don't want figuring out what is needed to get hung up over little
> details that we can change later.

OK. So I will drop this my change for now.

--
Rgrds, legion