Re: [rfc][patch] store-free path walking

Christoph Hellwig
2009-10-13T01:27:11Z

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 05:58:43AM +0200, Nick Piggin wrote:
> Tridge, Samba people: measuring vfs performance with dbench
> in my effort to improve Linux vfs scalability has shown up
> the statvfs syscall you make to be the final problematic
> issue for this workload. In particular reading /proc/mounts
> that glibc does to impement it. We could add complexity to
> the kernel to try improving it, or we could extend the
> statfs syscall so glibc can avoid the issue (requiring
> glibc upgrade). But I would like to know whether samba
> really uses statvfs() significantly?

Not sure if it's the reason why Samba uses it, but many portable
applications use statvfs because that is the standardizes one in
XPG / recent Posix while statfs is just a BSD extension Linux picked
up. So making sure statvfs goes fast is a pretty essential thing.