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path: root/Documentation/filesystems/path-lookup.txt
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2015-11-02Documentation: add new description of path-name lookup.Neil Brown
This document is based on three recent lwn.net articles. Some of the introductory material and linkage between articles has been removed, and some time-based descriptions have been revised. Also all links to code have been removed as the code is very close by. Contains corrections and improvements from Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>. Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neil@brown.name> Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
2011-03-31Fix common misspellingsLucas De Marchi
Fixes generated by 'codespell' and manually reviewed. Signed-off-by: Lucas De Marchi <lucas.demarchi@profusion.mobi>
2011-01-07fs: provide rcu-walk aware permission i_opsNick Piggin
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
2011-01-07fs: rcu-walk aware d_revalidate methodNick Piggin
Require filesystems be aware of .d_revalidate being called in rcu-walk mode (nd->flags & LOOKUP_RCU). For now do a simple push down, returning -ECHILD from all implementations. Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
2011-01-07fs: rcu-walk for path lookupNick Piggin
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 <npiggin@kernel.dk>