Re: [GIT PULL] Ceph fixes for 5.1-rc7

[Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>]

On Thu, 2019-04-25 at 11:02 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 10:48 AM Ilya Dryomov <idryomov@gmail.com> wrote:
> > dentry name handling fixes from Jeff and a memory leak fix from Zheng.
> > Both are old issues, marked for stable.
> 
> Hmm. You probably should have talked to Al about the dentry name
> issue, because he'd most likely have pointed you towards our helper
> function for exactly this thing:
> 
>     struct name_snapshot stable;
> 
>     take_dentry_name_snapshot(&stable, dentry);
>     ... use stable.name ..
>     release_dentry_name_snapshot(&stable);
> 
> which doesn't need any extra memory allocation outside of some fairly
> limited stack allocation for the 'name_snapshot' itself, because it
> knows about the dentry name rules, and
> 
>  - for inline names, it copies it under the d_lock into the fixed
> DNAME_INLINE_LEN-sized buffer
> 
>  - for out-of-line names, it knows that the name allocation is stable
> and ref-counted, and just increments the refcount and uses the
> existing name pointer.
> 
> now, maybe you need to always do that name allocation anyway (looking
> at the diff it looks like you often do that for other cases), so maybe
> the name snapshot capability isn't all that useful for you and the
> above wouldn't have helped, but I suspect you might not even have
> realized that there was an option like this.
> 
> I've pulled this, but maybe Jeff wants to look at whether that
> snapshotting model could have helped.
> 
>                        Linus

Thanks for the info! I think it would have.

I took a quick look at the dcache code to see if we had something like
that before I did this, but I guess I didn't look closely enough. Those
routines do look nicer than my hand-rolled version.

I'll look at spinning up a patch to switch that over in the near future.

Thanks,
-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>