Re: [PATCH 17/18] fs: icache remove inode_lock

Christoph Hellwig
2010-10-13T11:28:30Z

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 06:27:01PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> I'm happy to help to port the top of the patch set onto changes in
> earlier parts of it, but I would like the chance to do this really. I'm
> back in action now, so I can spend a lot of time catching up.

That's all good and fine, but it's really no reason for delaying getting
the most important bits in. RCU path walk is all good and fine, and
I'm really looking forward to eventually see it. But the basic
inode_lock and dcache_lock splits are fundamental work we need rather
sooner than later. Additional candy ontop of that is fine but we'll
need a solid base. Also note that having the locking split up, and
proper exported APIs instead of growling into dcache internals in
various filesystems means that we can start to look into replacing
the global inode and dcache hashes much more easily, and having
global data structures at least for the dcache is almost as bad
as having global locks.