[PATCH 00/11 RFC] Allow concurrent changes in a directory

NeilBrown
2024-12-20T03:08:44Z

A while ago I posted a patchset with a similar goal as this:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/166147828344.25420.13834885828450967910.stgit@noble.brown/

and recieved useful feedback. Here is a new version.

This version is not complete. It does not change rename and does not
change any filesystem to make use of the new opportunity for
parallelism. I'll work on those once the bases functionality is agreed
on.

With this series, instead of a filesystem setting a flag to indiciate
that parallel updates are support, there are now a new set of inode
operations with a _shared prefix. If a directory provides a _shared
interface it will be used with a shared lock on the inode, else the
current interface will be used with an exclusive lock.

When a shared lock is taken, we also take an exclusive lock on the
dentry using a couple of flag bits and the "wait_var_event"
infrastructure.

When an exclusive lock is needed (for the old interface) we still take a
shared lock on the directory i_rw_sem but also take a second exclusive
lock on the directory using a couple of flag bits and wait_var_event.
This is meant as a temporary measure until all filesystems are change to
use the _shared interfaces.

Not all calling code has been converted. Some callers outside of
fs/namei.c still take an exclusive lock with i_rw_sem. Some might never
be changed.

As yet this has only been lightly tested as I haven't add foo_shared
operations to any filesystem yet.

The motivation partly come from NFS where a high-latency network link
can cause a noticiable performance hit when multiple files are being
created concurrently in a directory. Another motivation is lustre which
can use a modified ext4 as the storage backend. One of the current
modification is to allow concurrent updates in a directory as lustre uses a flat directory structure to store data.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
NeilBrown

[PATCH 01/11] VFS: introduce vfs_mkdir_return()
[PATCH 02/11] VFS: add _shared versions of the various directory
[PATCH 03/11] VFS: use global wait-queue table for d_alloc_parallel()
[PATCH 04/11] VFS: use d_alloc_parallel() in lookup_one_qstr_excl()
[PATCH 05/11] VFS: change kern_path_locked() and
[PATCH 06/11] VFS: introduce done_lookup_and_lock()
[PATCH 07/11] VFS: introduce lookup_and_lock()
[PATCH 08/11] VFS: add inode_dir_lock/unlock
[PATCH 09/11] VFS: re-pack DENTRY_ flags.
[PATCH 10/11] VFS: take a shared lock for create/remove directory
[PATCH 11/11] nfsd: use lookup_and_lock_one()