[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, 19 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fsnotify.h b/include/linux/fsnotify.h
index 03b8e7932b83..f7e517c1f1bd 100644
--- a/include/linux/fsnotify.h
+++ b/include/linux/fsnotify.h
@@ -17,6 +17,25 @@
 #include <linux/inotify.h>
 
 /*
+ * fsnotify_d_instantiate - instantiate a dentry for inode
+ * Called with dcache_lock held.
+ */
+static inline void fsnotify_d_instantiate(struct dentry *entry,
+                                                struct inode *inode)
+{
+        inotify_d_instantiate(entry, inode);
+}
+
+/*
+ * fsnotify_d_move - entry has been moved
+ * Called with dcache_lock and entry->d_lock held.
+ */
+static inline void fsnotify_d_move(struct dentry *entry)
+{
+        inotify_d_move(entry);
+}
+
+/*
  * fsnotify_move - file old_name at old_dir was moved to new_name at new_dir
  */
 static inline void fsnotify_move(struct inode *old_dir, struct inode *new_dir,