Commit b3e19d92 authored by Nick Piggin's avatar Nick Piggin
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fs: scale mntget/mntput

The problem that this patch aims to fix is vfsmount refcounting scalability.
We need to take a reference on the vfsmount for every successful path lookup,
which often go to the same mount point.

The fundamental difficulty is that a "simple" reference count can never be made
scalable, because any time a reference is dropped, we must check whether that
was the last reference. To do that requires communication with all other CPUs
that may have taken a reference count.

We can make refcounts more scalable in a couple of ways, involving keeping
distributed counters, and checking for the global-zero condition less
frequently.

- check the global sum once every interval (this will delay zero detection
  for some interval, so it's probably a showstopper for vfsmounts).

- keep a local count and only taking the global sum when local reaches 0 (this
  is difficult for vfsmounts, because we can't hold preempt off for the life of
  a reference, so a counter would need to be per-thread or tied...
parent c6653a83
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