07 Jan, 2011

40 commits

  • This simple implementation just checks for no ACLs on the inode, and
    if so, then the rcu-walk may proceed, otherwise fail it.

    This could easily be extended to put acls under RCU and check them
    under seqlock, if need be. But this implementation is enough to show
    the rcu-walk aware permissions code for path lookups is working, and
    will handle cases where there are no ACLs or ACLs in just the final
    element.

    This patch implicity converts tmpfs to rcu-aware permission check.
    Subsequent patches onvert ext*, xfs, and, btrfs. Each of these uses
    acl/permission code in a different way, so convert them all to provide
    templates and proof of concept.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Require filesystems be aware of .d_revalidate being called in rcu-walk
    mode (nd->flags & LOOKUP_RCU). For now do a simple push down, returning
    -ECHILD from all implementations.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Put dentry and inode fields into top of data structure. This allows RCU path
    traversal to perform an RCU dentry lookup in a path walk by touching only the
    first 56 bytes of the dentry.

    We also fit in 8 bytes of inline name in the first 64 bytes, so for short
    names, only 64 bytes needs to be touched to perform the lookup. We should
    get rid of the hash->prev pointer from the first 64 bytes, and fit 16 bytes
    of name in there, which will take care of 81% rather than 32% of the kernel
    tree.

    inode is also rearranged so that RCU lookup will only touch a single cacheline
    in the inode, plus one in the i_ops structure.

    This is important for directory component lookups in RCU path walking. In the
    kernel source, directory names average is around 6 chars, so this works.

    When we reach the last element of the lookup, we need to lock it and take its
    refcount which requires another cacheline access.

    Align dentry and inode operations structs, so members will be at predictable
    offsets and we can group common operations into head of structure.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Reduce some branches and memory accesses in dcache lookup by adding dentry
    flags to indicate common d_ops are set, rather than having to check them.
    This saves a pointer memory access (dentry->d_op) in common path lookup
    situations, and saves another pointer load and branch in cases where we
    have d_op but not the particular operation.

    Patched with:

    git grep -E '[.>]([[:space:]])*d_op([[:space:]])*=' | xargs sed -e 's/\([^\t ]*\)->d_op = \(.*\);/d_set_d_op(\1, \2);/' -e 's/\([^\t ]*\)\.d_op = \(.*\);/d_set_d_op(\&\1, \2);/' -i

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Rather than keep a d_mounted count in the dentry, set a dentry flag instead.
    The flag can be cleared by checking the hash table to see if there are any
    mounts left, which is not time critical because it is performed at detach time.

    The mounted state of a dentry is only used to speculatively take a look in the
    mount hash table if it is set -- before following the mount, vfsmount lock is
    taken and mount re-checked without races.

    This saves 4 bytes on 32-bit, nothing on 64-bit but it does provide a hole I
    might use later (and some configs have larger than 32-bit spinlocks which might
    make use of the hole).

    Autofs4 conversion and changelog by Ian Kent :
    In autofs4, when expring direct (or offset) mounts we need to ensure that we
    block user path walks into the autofs mount, which is covered by another mount.
    To do this we clear the mounted status so that follows stop before walking into
    the mount and are essentially blocked until the expire is completed. The
    automount daemon still finds the correct dentry for the umount due to the
    follow mount logic in fs/autofs4/root.c:autofs4_follow_link(), which is set as
    an inode operation for direct and offset mounts only and is called following
    the lookup that stopped at the covered mount.

    At the end of the expire the covering mount probably has gone away so the
    mounted status need not be restored. But we need to check this and only restore
    the mounted status if the expire failed.

    XXX: autofs may not work right if we have other mounts go over the top of it?

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Use a seqlock in the fs_struct to enable us to take an atomic copy of the
    complete cwd and root paths. Use this in the RCU lookup path to avoid a
    thread-shared spinlock in RCU lookup operations.

    Multi-threaded apps may now perform path lookups with scalability matching
    multi-process apps. Operations such as stat(2) become very scalable for
    multi-threaded workload.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Perform common cases of path lookups without any stores or locking in the
    ancestor dentry elements. This is called rcu-walk, as opposed to the current
    algorithm which is a refcount based walk, or ref-walk.

    This results in far fewer atomic operations on every path element,
    significantly improving path lookup performance. It also avoids cacheline
    bouncing on common dentries, significantly improving scalability.

    The overall design is like this:
    * LOOKUP_RCU is set in nd->flags, which distinguishes rcu-walk from ref-walk.
    * Take the RCU lock for the entire path walk, starting with the acquiring
    of the starting path (eg. root/cwd/fd-path). So now dentry refcounts are
    not required for dentry persistence.
    * synchronize_rcu is called when unregistering a filesystem, so we can
    access d_ops and i_ops during rcu-walk.
    * Similarly take the vfsmount lock for the entire path walk. So now mnt
    refcounts are not required for persistence. Also we are free to perform mount
    lookups, and to assume dentry mount points and mount roots are stable up and
    down the path.
    * Have a per-dentry seqlock to protect the dentry name, parent, and inode,
    so we can load this tuple atomically, and also check whether any of its
    members have changed.
    * Dentry lookups (based on parent, candidate string tuple) recheck the parent
    sequence after the child is found in case anything changed in the parent
    during the path walk.
    * inode is also RCU protected so we can load d_inode and use the inode for
    limited things.
    * i_mode, i_uid, i_gid can be tested for exec permissions during path walk.
    * i_op can be loaded.

    When we reach the destination dentry, we lock it, recheck lookup sequence,
    and increment its refcount and mountpoint refcount. RCU and vfsmount locks
    are dropped. This is termed "dropping rcu-walk". If the dentry refcount does
    not match, we can not drop rcu-walk gracefully at the current point in the
    lokup, so instead return -ECHILD (for want of a better errno). This signals the
    path walking code to re-do the entire lookup with a ref-walk.

    Aside from the final dentry, there are other situations that may be encounted
    where we cannot continue rcu-walk. In that case, we drop rcu-walk (ie. take
    a reference on the last good dentry) and continue with a ref-walk. Again, if
    we can drop rcu-walk gracefully, we return -ECHILD and do the whole lookup
    using ref-walk. But it is very important that we can continue with ref-walk
    for most cases, particularly to avoid the overhead of double lookups, and to
    gain the scalability advantages on common path elements (like cwd and root).

    The cases where rcu-walk cannot continue are:
    * NULL dentry (ie. any uncached path element)
    * parent with d_inode->i_op->permission or ACLs
    * dentries with d_revalidate
    * Following links

    In future patches, permission checks and d_revalidate become rcu-walk aware. It
    may be possible eventually to make following links rcu-walk aware.

    Uncached path elements will always require dropping to ref-walk mode, at the
    very least because i_mutex needs to be grabbed, and objects allocated.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Add branch annotations for seqlock read fastpath, and introduce
    __read_seqcount_begin and __read_seqcount_end functions, that can avoid the
    smp_rmb() if used carefully. These will be used by store-free path walking
    algorithm performance is critical and seqlocks are in use.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Pseudo filesystems that don't put inode on RCU list or reachable by
    rcu-walk dentries do not need to RCU free their inodes.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • RCU free the struct inode. This will allow:

    - Subsequent store-free path walking patch. The inode must be consulted for
    permissions when walking, so an RCU inode reference is a must.
    - sb_inode_list_lock to be moved inside i_lock because sb list walkers who want
    to take i_lock no longer need to take sb_inode_list_lock to walk the list in
    the first place. This will simplify and optimize locking.
    - Could remove some nested trylock loops in dcache code
    - Could potentially simplify things a bit in VM land. Do not need to take the
    page lock to follow page->mapping.

    The downsides of this is the performance cost of using RCU. In a simple
    creat/unlink microbenchmark, performance drops by about 10% due to inability to
    reuse cache-hot slab objects. As iterations increase and RCU freeing starts
    kicking over, this increases to about 20%.

    In cases where inode lifetimes are longer (ie. many inodes may be allocated
    during the average life span of a single inode), a lot of this cache reuse is
    not applicable, so the regression caused by this patch is smaller.

    The cache-hot regression could largely be avoided by using SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU,
    however this adds some complexity to list walking and store-free path walking,
    so I prefer to implement this at a later date, if it is shown to be a win in
    real situations. I haven't found a regression in any non-micro benchmark so I
    doubt it will be a problem.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • The tricky locking for disposing of a dentry is duplicated 3 times in the
    dcache (dput, pruning a dentry from the LRU, and pruning its ancestors).
    Consolidate them all into a single function dentry_kill.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • prune_one_dentry can avoid quite a bit of locking in the common case where
    ancestors have an elevated refcount. Alternatively, we could have gone the
    other way and made fewer trylocks in the case where d_count goes to zero, but
    is probably less common.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Use RCU to simplify locking in dget_parent.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • dget_locked was a shortcut to avoid the lazy lru manipulation when we already
    held dcache_lock (lru manipulation was relatively cheap at that point).
    However, how that the lru lock is an innermost one, we never hold it at any
    caller, so the lock cost can now be avoided. We already have well working lazy
    dcache LRU, so it should be fine to defer LRU manipulations to scan time.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • dcache_inode_lock can be avoided in d_delete() and d_materialise_unique()
    in cases where it is not required.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • It is possible to run dput without taking data structure locks up-front. In
    many cases where we don't kill the dentry anyway, these locks are not required.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Long lived dcache "multi-step" operations which retry on rename seq can
    be starved with a lot of rename activity. If they fail after the 1st pass,
    take the rename_lock for writing to avoid further starvation.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • dcache_lock no longer protects anything. remove it.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • The remaining usages for dcache_lock is to allow atomic, multi-step read-side
    operations over the directory tree by excluding modifications to the tree.
    Also, to walk in the leaf->root direction in the tree where we don't have
    a natural d_lock ordering.

    This could be accomplished by taking every d_lock, but this would mean a
    huge number of locks and actually gets very tricky.

    Solve this instead by using the rename seqlock for multi-step read-side
    operations, retry in case of a rename so we don't walk up the wrong parent.
    Concurrent dentry insertions are not serialised against. Concurrent deletes
    are tricky when walking up the directory: our parent might have been deleted
    when dropping locks so also need to check and retry for that.

    We can also use the rename lock in cases where livelock is a worry (and it
    is introduced in subsequent patch).

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Cover d_name with d_lock in more cases, where there may be concurrent
    modification to it.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Add a new lock, dcache_inode_lock, to protect the inode's i_dentry list
    from concurrent modification. d_alias is also protected by d_lock.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Protect d_subdirs and d_child with d_lock, except in filesystems that aren't
    using dcache_lock for these anyway (eg. using i_mutex).

    Note: if we change the locking rule in future so that ->d_child protection is
    provided only with ->d_parent->d_lock, it may allow us to reduce some locking.
    But it would be an exception to an otherwise regular locking scheme, so we'd
    have to see some good results. Probably not worthwhile.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Protect d_unhashed(dentry) condition with d_lock. This means keeping
    DCACHE_UNHASHED bit in synch with hash manipulations.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Make d_count non-atomic and protect it with d_lock. This allows us to ensure a
    0 refcount dentry remains 0 without dcache_lock. It is also fairly natural when
    we start protecting many other dentry members with d_lock.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Add a new lock, dcache_lru_lock, to protect the dcache LRU list from concurrent
    modification. d_lru is also protected by d_lock, which allows LRU lists to be
    accessed without the lru lock, using RCU in future patches.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Add a new lock, dcache_hash_lock, to protect the dcache hash table from
    concurrent modification. d_hash is also protected by d_lock.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Remove dcache_lock locking from hostfs filesystem, and move it into dcache
    helpers. All that is required is a coherent path name. Protection from
    concurrent modification of the namespace after path name generation is not
    provided in current code, because dcache_lock is dropped before the path is
    used.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Change d_hash so it may be called from lock-free RCU lookups. See similar
    patch for d_compare for details.

    For in-tree filesystems, this is just a mechanical change.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Change d_compare so it may be called from lock-free RCU lookups. This
    does put significant restrictions on what may be done from the callback,
    however there don't seem to have been any problems with in-tree fses.
    If some strange use case pops up that _really_ cannot cope with the
    rcu-walk rules, we can just add new rcu-unaware callbacks, which would
    cause name lookup to drop out of rcu-walk mode.

    For in-tree filesystems, this is just a mechanical change.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • smpfs and ncpfs want to update a live dentry name in-place. Rather than
    have them open code the locking, provide a documented dcache API.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Use vfat's method for dealing with negative dentries to preserve case,
    rather than overwrite dentry name in d_revalidate, which is a bit ugly
    and also gets in the way of doing lock-free path walking.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Use vfat's method for dealing with negative dentries to preserve case,
    rather than overwrite dentry name in d_revalidate, which is a bit ugly
    and also gets in the way of doing lock-free path walking.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Change d_delete from a dentry deletion notification to a dentry caching
    advise, more like ->drop_inode. Require it to be constant and idempotent,
    and not take d_lock. This is how all existing filesystems use the callback
    anyway.

    This makes fine grained dentry locking of dput and dentry lru scanning
    much simpler.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Remove redundant (and incorrect, since dcache RCU lookup) dentry locking
    documentation and point to the canonical document.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Switching d_op on a live dentry is racy in general, so avoid it. In this case
    it is a negative dentry, which is safer, but there are still concurrent ops
    which may be called on d_op in that case (eg. d_revalidate). So in general
    a filesystem may not do this. Fix configfs so as not to do this.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin
     
  • Switching d_op on a live dentry is racy in general, so avoid it. In this case
    it is a negative dentry, which is safer, but there are still concurrent ops
    which may be called on d_op in that case (eg. d_revalidate). So in general
    a filesystem may not do this. Fix cgroupfs so as not to do this.

    Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin

    Nick Piggin