On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 02:12:05PM +0800, Guo Chao wrote: > On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 02:23:43PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote: > > On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 10:42:21AM +0800, Guo Chao wrote: > > > On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 08:49:12AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote: > > > > > > > On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 05:31:02PM +0800, Guo Chao wrote: > > > > > This patchset optimizes several places which take the per inode spin > > > > > lock. > > > > > They have not been fully tested yet, thus they are marked as RFC. > > > > > > > > Inodes are RCU freed. The i_lock spinlock on the i_state field forms > > > > part of the memory barrier that allows the RCU read side to > > > > correctly detect a freed inode during a RCU protected cache lookup > > > > (hash list traversal for the VFS, or a radix tree traversal for XFS). > > > > The i_lock usage around the hahs list operations ensures the hash > > > > list operations are atomic with state changes so that such changes > > > > are correctly detected during RCU-protected traversals... > > > > > > > > IOWs, removing the i_lock from around the i_state transitions and > > > > inode hash insert/remove/traversal operations will cause races in > > > > the RCU lookups and result in incorrectly using freed inodes instead > > > > of failing the lookup and creating a new one. > > > > > > > > So I don't think this is a good idea at all... ..... > > The inode hash lookup needs to check i_state atomically during the > > traversal so inodes being freed are skipped (e.g. I_FREEING, > > I_WILL_FREE). those i_state flags are set only with the i_lock held, > > and so inode hash lookups need to take the i_lock to guarantee the > > i_state field is correct. This inode data field synchronisation is > > separate to the cache hash list traversal protection. > > > > The only way to do this is to have an inner lock (inode->i_lock) > > that protects both the inode->i_hash_list and inode->i_state fields, > > and a lock order that provides outer list traversal protections > > (inode_hash_lock). Whether the outer lock is the inode_hash_lock or > > rcu_read_lock(), the lock order and the data fields the locks are > > protecting are the same.... > > > > > Of course, maybe they are there for something. Could you speak > > > more about the race this change (patch 1,2?) brings up? Thank you. > > > > When you drop the lock from the i_state initialisation, you end up > > dropping the implicit unlock->lock memory barrier that the > > inode->i_lock provides. i.e. you get this in iget_locked(): > > > > > > thread 1 thread 2 > > > > lock(inode_hash_lock) > > for_each_hash_item() > > > > inode->i_state = I_NEW > > hash_list_insert > > > > <finds newly inserted inode> > > lock(inode->i_lock) > > unlock(inode->i_lock) > > unlock(inode_hash_lock) > > > > wait_on_inode() > > <see inode->i_state = 0 > > > <uses inode before initialisation > > is complete> > > > > IOWs, there is no unlock->lock transition occurring on any lock, so > > there are no implicit memory barriers in this code, and so other > > CPUs are not guaranteed to see the "inode->i_state = I_NEW" write > > that thread 2 did. The lock/unlock pair around this I_NEW assignment > > guarantees that thread 1 will see the change to i_state correctly. > > > > So even without RCU, dropping the i_lock from these > > i_state/hash insert/remove operations will result in races > > occurring... > > This interleave can never happen because of inode_hash_lock.
Ah, sorry, I'm context switching too much right now. s/lock(inode_hash_lock)/rcu_read_lock. And that's the race condition the the locking order is *intended* to avoid. It's just that we haven't done the last piece of the work, which is replacing the read side inode_hash_lock usage with rcu_read_lock. > > Seriously, if you want to improve the locking of this code, go back > > an resurrect the basic RCU hash traversal patches (i.e. Nick's > > original patch rather than my SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU based ones). That > > has much more benefit to many more workloads than just removing a > > non-global, uncontended locks like this patch set does. > > > > Ah, this is intended to be a code clean patchset actually. I thought these > locks are redundant in an obvious and trivial manner. If, on the contrary, > they are such tricky, then never mind :) Thanks for your patient. The RCU conversion is actually trivial - everything is already set up for it to be done, and is simpler than this patch set. It pretty much is simply replacing all the read side inode_hash_lock pairs with rcu_read_lock()/rcu_read_unlock() pairs. Like I said, if you want to clean up this code, then RCU traversals are the conversion to make. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner da...@fromorbit.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
