Re: [PATCH 15/18] fs: introduce a per-cpu last_ino allocator

Al Viro
2010-10-08T09:58:29Z

On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 10:22:34AM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> writes:
>
> > From: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
> >
> > new_inode() dirties a contended cache line to get increasing
> > inode numbers. This limits performance on workloads that cause
> > significant parallel inode allocation.
> >
> > Solve this problem by using a per_cpu variable fed by the shared
> > last_ino in batches of 1024 allocations. This reduces contention on
> > the shared last_ino, and give same spreading ino numbers than before
> > (i.e. same wraparound after 2^32 allocations).
>
> This doesn't help for Unix disk file systems, so not fully sure why you
> need it for XFS.
>
> But looks reasonable, although it would be better to simply fix
> sockets/pipes/etc. to not allocate an inode numbers.

Can be done if you bother to add ->getattr() for those, but you'll need
to do some kind of lazy allocation of inumbers for those; fstat() _will_
want st_ino.