Re: dentry bloat.

[Dipankar Sarma <dipankar@in.ibm.com>]

On Sun, May 09, 2004 at 09:28:46AM +0200, Manfred Spraul wrote:
> What's the prupose of d_move_count?
> AFAICS it protects against a double rename: first to different bucket, 
> then back to original bucket. This changes the position of the dentry in 
> the hash chain and a concurrent lookup would skip entries.
> d_lock wouldn't prevent that.

Actually, what may happen is that since the dentries are added
in the front, a double move like that would result in hash chain
traversal looping. Timing dependent and unlikely, but d_move_count
avoided that theoritical possibility. It is not about skipping
dentries which is safe because a miss would result in a real_lookup()
anyway. If we do the comparison within d_lock, then atleast
we are guaranteed to get the right file. The remaining question
is whether we violate POSIX rename semantics in some twisted way.


> But I think d_bucket could be removed: for __d_lookup the test appears 
> to be redundant with the d_move_count test. The remaining users are not 
> performance critical, they could recalculate the bucket from d_parent 
> and d_name.hash.

Yes, afaics, d_move_count can effectively be used to work around
the possibility of the dentry moving to a different hash bucket.

Thanks
Dipankar