[PATCH] inotify: lock avoidance with parent watch status in dentry

Previous inotify work avoidance is good when inotify is completely unused,
but it breaks down if even a single watch is in place anywhere in the
system.  Robin Holt notices that udev is one such culprit - it slows down a
512-thread application on a 512 CPU system from 6 seconds to 22 minutes.

Solve this by adding a flag in the dentry that tells inotify whether or not
its parent inode has a watch on it.  Event queueing to parent will skip
taking locks if this flag is cleared.  Setting and clearing of this flag on
all child dentries versus event delivery: this is no in terms of race
cases, and that was shown to be equivalent to always performing the check.

The essential behaviour is that activity occuring _after_ a watch has been
added and _before_ it has been removed, will generate events.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/dcache.h b/include/linux/dcache.h
index 4361f3789975..d10bd30c337e 100644
--- a/include/linux/dcache.h
+++ b/include/linux/dcache.h
@@ -162,6 +162,8 @@ d_iput:		no		no		no       yes
 #define DCACHE_REFERENCED       0x0008  /* Recently used, don't discard. */
 #define DCACHE_UNHASHED         0x0010  
 
+#define DCACHE_INOTIFY_PARENT_WATCHED   0x0020 /* Parent inode is watched */
+
 extern spinlock_t dcache_lock;
 
 /**