04 Jan, 2012

1 commit


18 Apr, 2011

1 commit

  • While checking unregister_filesystem for saftey vs extra calls for
    "ext4: register ext2 and ext3 alias after ext4" I realized that
    the synchronize_rcu() was called on the error path but not on
    the success path.

    Cc: stable (2.6.38)
    Signed-off-by: Milton Miller
    [ This probably won't really make a difference since commit d863b50ab013
    ("vfs: call rcu_barrier after ->kill_sb()"), but it's the right thing
    to do. - Linus ]
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Milton Miller
     

07 Jan, 2011

1 commit

  • 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
     

30 Mar, 2010

1 commit

  • …it slab.h inclusion from percpu.h

    percpu.h is included by sched.h and module.h and thus ends up being
    included when building most .c files. percpu.h includes slab.h which
    in turn includes gfp.h making everything defined by the two files
    universally available and complicating inclusion dependencies.

    percpu.h -> slab.h dependency is about to be removed. Prepare for
    this change by updating users of gfp and slab facilities include those
    headers directly instead of assuming availability. As this conversion
    needs to touch large number of source files, the following script is
    used as the basis of conversion.

    http://userweb.kernel.org/~tj/misc/slabh-sweep.py

    The script does the followings.

    * Scan files for gfp and slab usages and update includes such that
    only the necessary includes are there. ie. if only gfp is used,
    gfp.h, if slab is used, slab.h.

    * When the script inserts a new include, it looks at the include
    blocks and try to put the new include such that its order conforms
    to its surrounding. It's put in the include block which contains
    core kernel includes, in the same order that the rest are ordered -
    alphabetical, Christmas tree, rev-Xmas-tree or at the end if there
    doesn't seem to be any matching order.

    * If the script can't find a place to put a new include (mostly
    because the file doesn't have fitting include block), it prints out
    an error message indicating which .h file needs to be added to the
    file.

    The conversion was done in the following steps.

    1. The initial automatic conversion of all .c files updated slightly
    over 4000 files, deleting around 700 includes and adding ~480 gfp.h
    and ~3000 slab.h inclusions. The script emitted errors for ~400
    files.

    2. Each error was manually checked. Some didn't need the inclusion,
    some needed manual addition while adding it to implementation .h or
    embedding .c file was more appropriate for others. This step added
    inclusions to around 150 files.

    3. The script was run again and the output was compared to the edits
    from #2 to make sure no file was left behind.

    4. Several build tests were done and a couple of problems were fixed.
    e.g. lib/decompress_*.c used malloc/free() wrappers around slab
    APIs requiring slab.h to be added manually.

    5. The script was run on all .h files but without automatically
    editing them as sprinkling gfp.h and slab.h inclusions around .h
    files could easily lead to inclusion dependency hell. Most gfp.h
    inclusion directives were ignored as stuff from gfp.h was usually
    wildly available and often used in preprocessor macros. Each
    slab.h inclusion directive was examined and added manually as
    necessary.

    6. percpu.h was updated not to include slab.h.

    7. Build test were done on the following configurations and failures
    were fixed. CONFIG_GCOV_KERNEL was turned off for all tests (as my
    distributed build env didn't work with gcov compiles) and a few
    more options had to be turned off depending on archs to make things
    build (like ipr on powerpc/64 which failed due to missing writeq).

    * x86 and x86_64 UP and SMP allmodconfig and a custom test config.
    * powerpc and powerpc64 SMP allmodconfig
    * sparc and sparc64 SMP allmodconfig
    * ia64 SMP allmodconfig
    * s390 SMP allmodconfig
    * alpha SMP allmodconfig
    * um on x86_64 SMP allmodconfig

    8. percpu.h modifications were reverted so that it could be applied as
    a separate patch and serve as bisection point.

    Given the fact that I had only a couple of failures from tests on step
    6, I'm fairly confident about the coverage of this conversion patch.
    If there is a breakage, it's likely to be something in one of the arch
    headers which should be easily discoverable easily on most builds of
    the specific arch.

    Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
    Guess-its-ok-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
    Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
    Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com>

    Tejun Heo
     

21 Apr, 2009

1 commit


14 Jan, 2009

1 commit


06 Jan, 2009

1 commit


23 Oct, 2008

1 commit


09 May, 2007

1 commit

  • There's a slight problem with filesystem type representation in fuse
    based filesystems.

    From the kernel's view, there are just two filesystem types: fuse and
    fuseblk. From the user's view there are lots of different filesystem
    types. The user is not even much concerned if the filesystem is fuse based
    or not. So there's a conflict of interest in how this should be
    represented in fstab, mtab and /proc/mounts.

    The current scheme is to encode the real filesystem type in the mount
    source. So an sshfs mount looks like this:

    sshfs#user@server:/ /mnt/server fuse rw,nosuid,nodev,...

    This url-ish syntax works OK for sshfs and similar filesystems. However
    for block device based filesystems (ntfs-3g, zfs) it doesn't work, since
    the kernel expects the mount source to be a real device name.

    A possibly better scheme would be to encode the real type in the type
    field as "type.subtype". So fuse mounts would look like this:

    /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows fuseblk.ntfs-3g rw,...
    user@server:/ /mnt/server fuse.sshfs rw,nosuid,nodev,...

    This patch adds the necessary code to the kernel so that this can be
    correctly displayed in /proc/mounts.

    Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Miklos Szeredi
     

15 Feb, 2007

1 commit

  • After Al Viro (finally) succeeded in removing the sched.h #include in module.h
    recently, it makes sense again to remove other superfluous sched.h includes.
    There are quite a lot of files which include it but don't actually need
    anything defined in there. Presumably these includes were once needed for
    macros that used to live in sched.h, but moved to other header files in the
    course of cleaning it up.

    To ease the pain, this time I did not fiddle with any header files and only
    removed #includes from .c-files, which tend to cause less trouble.

    Compile tested against 2.6.20-rc2 and 2.6.20-rc2-mm2 (with offsets) on alpha,
    arm, i386, ia64, mips, powerpc, and x86_64 with allnoconfig, defconfig,
    allmodconfig, and allyesconfig as well as a few randconfigs on x86_64 and all
    configs in arch/arm/configs on arm. I also checked that no new warnings were
    introduced by the patch (actually, some warnings are removed that were emitted
    by unnecessarily included header files).

    Signed-off-by: Tim Schmielau
    Acked-by: Russell King
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Tim Schmielau
     

30 Sep, 2006

1 commit


31 Oct, 2005

1 commit

  • I recently picked up my older work to remove unnecessary #includes of
    sched.h, starting from a patch by Dave Jones to not include sched.h
    from module.h. This reduces the number of indirect includes of sched.h
    by ~300. Another ~400 pointless direct includes can be removed after
    this disentangling (patch to follow later).
    However, quite a few indirect includes need to be fixed up for this.

    In order to feed the patches through -mm with as little disturbance as
    possible, I've split out the fixes I accumulated up to now (complete for
    i386 and x86_64, more archs to follow later) and post them before the real
    patch. This way this large part of the patch is kept simple with only
    adding #includes, and all hunks are independent of each other. So if any
    hunk rejects or gets in the way of other patches, just drop it. My scripts
    will pick it up again in the next round.

    Signed-off-by: Tim Schmielau
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Tim Schmielau
     

17 Apr, 2005

1 commit

  • Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
    even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
    archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
    3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
    git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
    infrastructure for it.

    Let it rip!

    Linus Torvalds