Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sun, 16 Sep 2007, Jörn Engel wrote: >> >> My approach is to have one for mount points and ramfs/tmpfs/sysfs/etc. >> which are pinned for their entire lifetime and another for regular >> files/inodes. One could take a three-way approach and have >> always-pinned, often-pinned and rarely-pinned. >> >> We won't get never-pinned that way. > > That sounds pretty good. The problem, of course, is that most of the time, > the actual dentry allocation itself is done before you really know which > case the dentry will be in, and the natural place for actually giving the > dentry lifetime hint is *not* at "d_alloc()", but when we "instantiate" > it with d_add() or d_instantiate(). > > But it turns out that most of the filesystems we care about already use a > special case of "d_add()" that *already* replaces the dentry with another > one in some cases: "d_splice_alias()". > > So I bet that if we just taught "d_splice_alias()" to look at the inode, > and based on the inode just re-allocate the dentry to some other slab > cache, we'd already handle a lot of the cases! > > And yes, you'd end up with the reallocation overhead quite often, but at > least it would now happen only when filling in a dentry, not in the > (*much* more critical) cached lookup path. > > Linus
You would only get it for dentries that live long (or your prediction is awfully wrong) and then the reallocation amortizes over time if you will. :) MfG Goswin - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/