Re: [PATCH v3 03/25] dcache: Enable lockless update of d_count indentry structure

From: Waiman Long
Date: Wed Jul 03 2013 - 16:53:13 EST


On 07/03/2013 04:37 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
This patch grew a lot, and that seems to be mainly because of bad reasons.

That is the main reason why I choose to implement it the way it was in my previous version. As I add one more level to access d_lock and d_count, I need to change a lot more files.

I'd suggest dropping the whole
"lockref_ret_count()"/"lockref_ret_lock()" helpers, which cause all
the annoyance, and just make people use the members directly.

Yes, I can do that. They are used in not that many places.

Then, just do

#define d_lock d_lockref.lockref_lock

or similar, so that all the existing code just continues to work,
without the need for the syntactic changes:

- spin_lock(&dentry->d_lock);
+ d_lock(dentry);

I had been thinking about that. The use of d_lock should be pretty safe as I didn't see that variable name used in other places. I didn't do it because I am afraid that people may say that using macro mapping like this is not a good idea. By doing that, the patch should shrink considerably.

For d_count, we probably do need to have the wrapper macro:

#define dentry_count(dentry) ((dentry)->d_lockref.lockref_count)

and change the existing users of "dentry->d_count" to use that, but
there are fewer of those than there are of people taking the dentry
lock. And most of them are in fs/dcache.c and would be affected by
this set of patches anyway.

The d_count name is not unique to the dentry structure. So files that access d_count have to be modified explicitly.

I will see if there are more feedback and send an updated patchset by the end of this week or early next week.

Regards,
Longman
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