Re: [PATCH 0/3 v3] dcache: make it more scalable on large system

["J. Bruce Fields" <bfields-uC3wQj2KruNg9hUCZPvPmw@public.gmane.org>]

On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 11:55:14AM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> On 05/26/2013 10:09 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:
> >On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 05:34:23PM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> >>On 05/23/2013 05:42 AM, Dave Chinner wrote:
> >>>
> >>>What was it I said about this patchset when you posted it to speed
> >>>up an Oracle benchmark back in february? I'll repeat:
> >>>
> >>>"Nobody should be doing reverse dentry-to-name lookups in a quantity
> >>>sufficient for it to become a performance limiting factor."
> >>Thank for the comment, but my point is that it is the d_lock
> >>contention is skewing the data about how much spin lock contention
> >>had actually happened in the workload and it makes it harder to
> >>pinpoint problem areas to look at. This is not about performance, it
> >>is about accurate representation of performance data. Ideally, we
> >>want the overhead of turning on perf instrumentation to be as low as
> >>possible.
> >Right. But d_path will never be "low overhead", and as such it
> >shouldn't be used by perf.
> 
> The d_path() is called by perf_event_mmap_event() which translates
> VMA to its file path for memory segments backed by files. As perf is
> not just for sampling data within the kernel, it can also be used
> for checking access pattern in the user space. As a result, it needs
> to map VMAs back to the backing files to access their symbols
> information. If d_path() is not the right function to call for this
> purpose, what other alternatives do we have?

As Dave said before, is the last path component sufficient?  Or how
about an inode number?

--b.