RE: VM issue causing high CPU loads

Muntz, Daniel
2009-09-03T21:22:03Z

Amen. I understand that v4 wants to extend across domains, etc., but it
goes out of its way to prevent the use of uids/gids, which in the vast
majority of installations would work just fine and wouldn't incur the
overhead of the mapping/unmapping operations. There's no reason
uids/gids couldn't coexist with string names. If the 4.0 spec had a
slightly different version of this paragraph:

To provide a greater degree of compatibility with previous versions
of NFS (i.e., v2 and v3), which identified users and groups by 32-bit
unsigned uid's and gid's, owner and group strings that consist of
decimal numeric values with no leading zeros can be given a special
interpretation by clients and servers which choose to provide such
support. The receiver may treat such a user or group string as
representing the same user as would be represented by a v2/v3 uid or
gid having the corresponding numeric value. A server is not
obligated to accept such a string, but may return an NFS4ERR_BADOWNER
instead. To avoid this mechanism being used to subvert user and
group translation, so that a client might pass all of the owners and
groups in numeric form, a server SHOULD return an NFS4ERR_BADOWNER
error when there is a valid translation for the user or owner
designated in this way. In that case, the client must use the
appropriate name@domain string and not the special form for
compatibility.

i.e., take out the "subvert" portion, and just plain allow string
representations of uids/gids, then at least the conversion would just be
an atoi and itoa. Even better, allow the uids/gids to be used directly
and avoid the atoi/itoa, perhaps with a flag. Either case is better
than idmapd and getting EDELAY and an X-second pause in odd places
because NFS has to go to userspace for a translation.

-Dan Quixote

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Kirby [mailto:sim@hostway.ca]
> Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 1:06 PM
> To: Trond Myklebust
> Cc: Yohan; Andrew Morton; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org;
> linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org; Neil Brown; J. Bruce Fields;
> mikevs@xs4all.net
> Subject: Re: VM issue causing high CPU loads
>
> On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 10:02:06AM -0400, Trond Myklebust wrote:
>
> > OK, so 16 hash buckets are likely to be filled with ~10^6
> entries each.
> > I can see that might be a performance issue...
>
> We have a similar setup with millions of UIDs over NFS
> (currently NFSv3).
> I _wish_ there were a way to use NFSv4 without having to use
> name-mapped UIDs and GIDs, since our user and group names
> come from MySQL anyway, and are guaranteed to be consistent
> across machines.
>
> Why on earth does NFSv4 force the use of names?
>
> I was considering hacking the code to stick IDs in there
> anyway, but I haven't looked at the feasibility of this. I
> suspect this would break or complicate other things, but the
> current NFSv4 design just seems like an incredible waste for
> this case.
>
> Simon-
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