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

Eric Dumazet
2015-04-18T19:41:43Z

On Sat, 2015-04-18 at 00:02 +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...

I would rather use an xchg() instead of rcu_assign_ponter()

old = xchg(&fdt->fd[fd], file);
if (unlikely(old))
filp_close(old, files);

If threads are using close() on random fds, final result is not
guaranteed anyway.