Re: [PATCH] vfs: Speed up deactivate_super for non-modular filesystems

[Eric W. Biederman]

"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Mon, May 07, 2012 at 11:17:06PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
>> On Mon, May 07, 2012 at 02:51:08PM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> 
>> > /proc and similar non-modular filesystems do not need a rcu_barrier
>> > in deactivate_locked_super.  Being non-modular there is no danger
>> > of the rcu callback running after the module is unloaded.
>> 
>> There's more than just a module unload there, though - actual freeing
>>  struct super_block also happens past that rcu_barrier()...

Al.  I have not closely audited the entire code path but at a quick
sample I see no evidence that anything depends on inode->i_sb being
rcu safe.  Do you know of any such location?

It has only been a year and a half since Nick added this code which
isn't very much time to have grown strange dependencies like that.

> Is there anything in there for which synchronous operation is required?
> If not, one approach would be to drop the rcu_barrier() calls to a
> workqueue or something similar.

We need to drain all of the rcu callbacks before we free the slab
and unload the module.

This actually makes deactivate_locked_super the totally wrong place
for the rcu_barrier.  We want the rcu_barrier in the module exit
routine where we destroy the inode cache.

What I see as the real need is the filesystem modules need to do:
	rcu_barrier()
	kmem_cache_destroy(cache);

Perhaps we can add some helpers to make it easy.  But I think
I would be happy today with simply moving the rcu_barrier into
every filesystems module exit path, just before the file system
module destoryed it's inode cache.

Eric

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