Re: [RFC PATCH] fs: use a sequence counter instead of file_lock in fd_install

Mateusz Guzik
2015-04-20T13:06:47Z

On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 12:02:52AM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 12:16:48AM +0200, Mateusz Guzik wrote:
>
> > I would say this makes the use of seq counter impossible. Even if we
> > decided to fall back to a lock on retry, we cannot know what to do if
> > the slot is reserved - it very well could be that something called
> > close, and something else reserved the slot, so putting the file inside
> > could be really bad. In fact we would be putting a file for which we
> > don't have a reference anymore.
> >
> > However, not all hope is lost and I still think we can speed things up.
> >
> > A locking primitive which only locks stuff for current cpu and has
> > another mode where it locks stuff for all cpus would do the trick just
> > fine. I'm not a linux guy, quick search suggests 'lglock' would do what
> > I want.
> >
> > table reallocation is an extremely rare operation, so this should be
> > fine. It would take the lock 'globally' for given table.
>
> It would also mean percpu_alloc() for each descriptor table...

Well as it was noted I have not checked how it's implemented at the time
of writing the message. I agree embedding something like this into files
struct is a non-starter.

I would say this could work with a small set of locks, selected by hashing
struct files pointer.

Table resizing is supposed to be extremely rare - most processes should
not need it at all (if they do, the default size is too small and should
be adjusted). Not only that, the lock is only needed if the process in
question is multithreaded.

So I would say this would not contend in real-world workloads, but still
looks crappy.

Unfortunately the whole thing loses original appeal of a simple hack
with no potential perfomrance drawbacks. Maybe I'll hack it up later and
run some tests anyway.

--
Mateusz Guzik